BACKUP TESTING AND ITS IMPORTANCE

12/17/20 - backups

Undermining your backups is to undermine your business. But backing up your data is only a fraction of the big picture for a viable disaster recovery plan. Simply, the purpose of backups is to protect against hardware failures, outages, corruption, acts of nature, and user error.

What a lot of small businesses do not seem to realize is that downtime costs a lot of money. Not only are you potentially not making any income, but you are also still paying for your employees – among other things, such as a botched disaster recovery plan that is not accounted for.

But even is a redundant backup system that provides minimal downtime in the even of total failure, it is still worthless if your backups are bad. Imagine having a complete system failure, and both your onsite and offsite backups for the past 6 months are all corrupt.

Regular testing of backups is the only way to truly verify that those backups are good. Even just receiving a ‘Screenshot Verification’ that the backup boots into the OS is underselling the importance of said backups and undermines the importance of your business. Those files stored on a different volume could all be corrupt, that database could be running, but empty.

But what backup solution is the best to start off with? How do you appropriately prepare for a disaster recovery scenario? There are many options that all preach to do something better than the next competitor, but honestly, they largely do the same thing – it is just a matter of what solution has the least failure rate. Not StorageCraft.

What should be tested, and when?

Like mentioned above, to just trust that a backup was taken “successfully”, or that a “Screenshot Verification” came back positive, could be setting you up for failure. Backups should be restored, mounted, and reviewed with detail – verify files are accessible, that the applications and databases are accurate and responsive.

Time to restore should also be verified. Some solutions allow you to run directly from the backup files (with an understandable detriment to performance), which will trump restoring from a completely down scenario.

The actual planned testing of backups should become a routine. While it is not practical to test every single backup, which is taken (and you should have more than 1 backup taken per day), but weekly is a “best option”, while monthly is acceptable. Backups should also be reviewed and tested after any related infrastructure changes, as it is easy to overlook that migrated server holding your orders and products has not been backed up in two weeks, and you just got ransomware.

While your backups may not be the “life blood” of your company, you will regret not having a working solution when something major fails. Do not undersell their importance and undermine your business – spend the extra resources and time to verify that – in the event that the worst should happen – you will be ready.