Your backups work. Probably… maybe… hopefully…
If you ask people or organisations if they make regular backups of their data, the vast majority will say yes.
If you ask them when they last tried to restore them, you’ll mostly get silence.
I’m one of these people. For a long time, I diligently made backups but never tested them. Then, luckily, one day I decided to restore one as a test … and it failed.
That’s the thing: backups break and most of us find out only when we need them. One of my clients recently discovered the NAS (Network Attached Storage) in their office had been backing up an empty folder for months. Luckily for them, they had a secondary backup in the cloud.
You may have heard of the “3-2-1” rule: 3 copies of your data, 2 different types of storage, 1 copy off-site.
There’s often one of these missing, usually the off-site one. That could be cloud storage, but it could also be a hard drive in a different office. It’s the best protection against fires or even ransomware attacks.
But make sure you test them all. So, at regular intervals, pick a random file and try to restore it. If you can’t, you don’t really have a backup solution.
A few notes:
If you’re choosing a cloud backup solution, don’t forget to take digital sovereignty into account and choose a European solution.
A sync service like Google Drive or DropBox is not a backup. If you delete a file or, worse, if ransomware encrypts it, those changes will be propagated everywhere.
Whatever solution you choose, just make sure you test it.
Colin