When did you last test a restore?
Almost every organisation has backups. Far fewer have tried to restore from them. The gap between the two only shows on the day something goes wrong: a deleted folder, a failed disk, a laptop left on a train or a ransomware attack that encrypts the shared drive.
Backups fail quietly. The job stopped running months ago and nobody saw the warning. The new finance system was never added. The only copy sits on the same server as the original. The files are there, but restoring them would take a week nobody has. Each of these looks fine until the moment you need it.
A backup you can rely on has a few things in common.
The last one is most often missing, and it is the one that tells you whether the others are working.
Decide how long you can be without it.
Two questions shape a sensible backup plan. How much work could you afford to lose: an hour, a day, a week? And how long could you manage without each system before it starts to cost you clients? The answers are different for the accounts database and the photo archive, and the backup should reflect that.
Once those are agreed, recovery stops being guesswork. Backups run automatically, they are checked regularly, and test restores provide evidence that they work. If the worst happens, you already know what will come back and roughly how long it will take.
Backup and recovery is part of every managed IT agreement, and of the hosting we look after. If you are not sure when your backups were last tested, ask us to take a look.
A backup only counts if it restores. We test recovery so you know it works.