How to check your business backups actually work

Most people find out too late

Almost every business has some kind of backup. A lot fewer know whether it works. Someone set it up years ago, a light blinks on a drive under a desk, and everyone assumes it’s fine. Then a laptop dies, or a file gets overwritten, or the server won’t start, and that’s when you learn the last good copy is months old. Or that it was never really running.

You can check this yourself in about ten minutes. You don’t need to be technical to do it.

Start with what you’d miss

Before you look at any software, write down what the business couldn’t run without for a day. For most offices that’s the accounts, customer records and quotes, the shared documents folder, email, and the website. Then add whatever lives on just one person’s laptop, because there’s always something.

That list is what the backup is for. If something on it isn’t covered, you’ve found your first job.

The ten minute check

• When did the last backup finish? If you can’t find that out anywhere, that is already your answer.
• Restore one file. Pick something you edited last week and bring it back into a different folder. Open it and make sure it’s the right one and not corrupted.
• Where does the copy actually sit? A drive plugged into the same computer, or in the same room, goes down with it in a fire, a theft or a power surge.
• Who finds out when a backup fails? If the warning goes to someone who left two years ago, or to nobody, nothing will tell you it has stopped.

One copy isn’t a backup

The usual rule of thumb is three copies of anything that matters, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them somewhere else. For a small office that can be as simple as the original, a copy on a drive or server in the office, and a copy in the cloud. It doesn’t have to be clever. It has to be more than one place.

Careful with anything that’s always connected

A backup drive that’s permanently plugged in, or a shared folder every computer can write to, can be wiped or encrypted along with the original. That is how ransomware ruins people who thought they were covered.

So keep at least one copy that the everyday computers can’t change: a separate login, a drive that’s unplugged, or a service that keeps older versions. That’s the copy that saves you on the bad day.

File sync isn’t the same as a backup

Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive are brilliant for sharing files, but they mirror what you do. Delete a file and the deletion syncs too. Most of them keep older versions for a while, so check how long, and whether that’s enough for you. Don’t assume.

Your website and hosting too

If your site lives on a hosting account, don’t treat that account as the only copy. Ours can’t be used purely as a storage or backup service, and when an account isn’t renewed the data is deleted 30 days after it expires. If you’re ever moving away, take a full copy first.

On a VPS the same point applies. They are self-managed by default, so backups are yours to look after unless you take the managed option, which covers updates, patching, monitoring and backups.

How often should it run?

Ask yourself how much work you could stand to redo. If losing a day of entries would be a pain but survivable, daily is fine. If losing an hour hurts, you need something more frequent. Most small businesses sit at daily.

If you’d rather someone else looked

Checking backups is something we do as part of IT support, and it’s on our cyber security and backups page. We look at what you have, tell you honestly what it needs, and give you a fixed quote in writing before any work starts.

And if data has already gone, tell us early. We’ll try to recover it, but we can’t promise, and an attempt is chargeable even when it doesn’t work out. We say that before we start so there are no surprises on the invoice.