Sometimes taking the backup is not enough

For those that are still not backing up your data on a regular basis, your day of reckoning will come.   One day, when you least expect it, your system will crash and you will lose those important files, family pictures, or worse yet, your entire business. 

 

Now that the customary scare tactics have been applied, this message is actually for those that do take diligent backups.  This is a warning and an example that it is not enough to turn on your backup and leave it.    It’s not enough to set up your backups, walk away and assume that when your system does go down you can easily restore files from your last backup. 

 

I recently worked with someone that learned a valuable lesson from that very assumption.  In this case, the data was backed up from a laptop to an external hard drive.  Backups were taken frequently, and when the laptop crashed one day, the system was restored from what was assumed a to be a recent backup.  After several hours of confusion and research, it turned out the backups had not been successful for several months.  When the data was restored, six months of data was lost.  Oops would be an understatement…

 

The lesson here is even though you set up your backups, that is not enough.  You need to follow up periodically to make sure those backups are in working order.  Considering there are many backup tools and methods, the easiest method is to check the backup device periodically.  Look at the files you are backing up.  Are all the files there?  Do they reflect the most recent time you backed up?  If not, then your backups are not working.  Check your software, your logs, or contact an IT professional to get it corrected before the day comes when you have to depend on it.