Almost every small firm we talk to has a backup running. Far fewer have ever restored anything from it. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them only ever shows up on the worst day of the year.
Why “backups are running” means very little
Backup software reports success for all sorts of things that are not success. It will happily report a green tick while:
- skipping a folder it lost permission to read eight months ago
- backing up a database file that was open, and is therefore unusable
- writing to a drive that is full, keeping only the oldest copies
- protecting a server nobody remembered to re-add after it was rebuilt
None of those are exotic. All of them are quiet. Every one is invisible until somebody needs a file back.
The ten-minute check
You do not need to be technical to run this. Ask whoever handles your IT for four things, in writing:
- The date of the last successful test restore. Not the last successful backup — the last time a file was actually pulled back out and opened. If the answer is a shrug, you have your answer.
- A list of exactly what is covered. Which machines, which folders, which applications. Then read it and look for what is missing.
- Where the off-site copy lives, and who can reach it. A backup an attacker can delete with the same stolen password is not a backup, it is a second copy of the problem.
- How long a full restore would take. If your server died this afternoon, are you working tomorrow morning or next week? Both are valid answers. Only one of them can be planned around.
Then ask for a restore, this week
Pick a file. Something ordinary — last quarter's spreadsheet, a client folder. Ask for it to be restored from backup and sent to you. It costs your provider twenty minutes and it is the only test that means anything.
If it comes back quickly, you have a real backup and you can stop worrying about it. If it does not, you have found that out on a quiet Tuesday instead of during a ransomware incident, which is the cheapest possible day to find it.
How we handle this: every StriperTech client gets a restore tested once a month, and the date written down. It is on the services page because it is the single question we would want a prospective provider to have a good answer to.