How do I know if my backups are good?
In today’s world, regular and reliable backups are crucial. Most importantly, they protect your data in the event of a disaster and help your business recover quickly. However, it can be difficult to know if your backups are good and doing their job.
Regularly Test your Backups
Small Scale Testing
You can perform some small scale testing of your backups by attempting to restore a few individual files. By doing so, you can test the reliability of your backups on a smaller level to reduce the time and resource cost. Check each of the individual files to make sure they open correctly and contain the information you expect.
Full System Restore
If your backups are passing the small scale testing, you can move onto attempting to do a full system restore on a spare hard drive. This will ensure that you have a good and reliable copy of your backup should something go wrong. If your backup does not pass the full system restore, you should look to backup your data again.
Check Backup Logs
You can check your backup logs to view the status of each backup file. Review these logs regularly for errors and issues. Some things you should look out for include unsuccessful backup messages and skipped files. Investigate any of these error messages to determine what caused the issue, and rerun your backup.
Check What is Being Backed Up
One common problem is finding out too late that your backup wasn’t capturing all the necessary information and files. Make sure you are confirming what data, files, and programs your backup is capturing. It’s important that your business can recover all your critical data in the event of a disaster.
Use Multiple Backup Methods
One way to minimize the chance of your backups failing is by using multiple methods to backup your data. The most common methods include a local backup with external hard drives and cloud backups with services like OneDrive or Acronis.
Managed Backup Services
Alternatively, you can consult with an IT company that offers managed backup services. With OAC, you don’t have to worry about testing, maintaining, or updating your backups. We will take care of ensuring your business data is safe and protected, and in the event of a disaster, we will help get your business back up and running quickly. Since we use cloud backups, we are alerted right away if there are any issues with your backups, so we can fix them before there are any problems. We will verify your backup selections are accurate so that the data that is important to your business is protected.
Contact us today for a free consultation.
