You may think that your small business’s data is safe, but you can’t know for sure unless a professional is regularly verifying that your backup solutions work. If no one is testing your restores, you may only realize that you can’t properly restore your files, applications, or other important data until it is already too late! But what does it mean to “verify” a backup, and “test” your restores?
Backup verification and test restores explained
Backup verification assures you that your backups are working correctly – this gives you that extra assurance that your data is safe. With a proper backup solution setup, your IT professional will get regular reports of each backup. When a discrepancy occurs, they’ll see it immediately. Your data is only as good as your last backup, so being proactive and verifying that your backups work properly is crucial to your business.
Testing your restores regularly is essential to ensuring that your backup plan can withstand a disaster. This testing involves making sure that you can recover your data with various failure conditions, often on a virtual machine. If you’ve never tested your restores, you can’t be sure that you’ll be able to successfully recover your data if faced with hard drive failure, ransomware, or other data disasters. Test restores need to be performed regularly to account for changing conditions and environments.
Backup verification and testing are considered the last steps in planning a disaster recovery plan – you’re not done until you’ve considered both. You can learn more about creating a disaster recovery plan by reading Disaster Recovery Plan – Is Your Business Prepared?.
Don’t just “set it and forget it”
Backing up your data is not simply a situation where you can “set it and forget it.” You need to regularly ensure that your data backups actually work. A backup is useless if it doesn’t work properly! You should make sure that whoever is handling your disaster recovery plan knows to properly test functionality of backups via regular test restores and backup verification.
If you’re using a free backup solution on your own such as One Drive or Google Drive, you don’t have the assurance that anything will work properly when a catastrophe occurs. In this case, there’s no one available to you to verify that your backups can give you full and working access to all of your essential data. You don’t get regular reports of any discrepancies, and no one is performing any sort of tests or maintenance.
The lack of backup verification is just one reason why these free services are not suitable for your business – you can click on the following post to read more about these issues: Are Free Backup Solutions a Good Choice for My Business?
A Backup Solution to Rule Them All
Luckily, there are solutions that provide business-level security, testing, and functionality. This is where ShadowProtect SPX comes in. ShadowProtect SPX allows your IT professional to spin up a VM and perform all the necessary tests without the risk of unintentionally changing the production environment. With the ability to perform image integrity, file system, OS integrity, and complete tests, you can be assured that you will have access to your data when you need it most.
Contact Kitsap Networking Services to ensure that every step of your disaster recovery plan is covered. We can tailor the best solution specifically for your business, letting you rest easy knowing that your data is safe.
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