The backup you've never restored

You have been told your backups are fine. You would be right to be sceptical of one more person saying otherwise.

So I will not. I will ask instead.

When was the last time someone restored one of your production databases, all the way, and proved it worked? Not checked that the backup job ran green. Restored it.

For most organisations the honest answer is: never, or not this year. The job runs every night, the tick is green, and everyone moves on. A green tick means a file was written. It does not mean the file is any good, that it covers the right databases, or that you can bring the business back from it inside the time you promised the board.

Is it your policy to run on a backup nobody has ever restored? No. Nobody would write that policy down. And yet that is the live position in most estates we assess.

A backup you have never restored is not a backup. It is a hope with a filename.

The day you find out is the worst possible day to find out. When the restore fails at 2:39 in the morning, the cost is not the database. It is the hours, the customers, the audit finding, and the conversation with the board about why the one control everyone assumed was working, wasn’t.

So here is the only question that matters. How would you prove to your board, today, that your most important database could be back inside your stated recovery time? If the answer has the word “should” in it, that is the gap.

We run a free, read-only health check that tells you, in plain English, whether your backups are real and recoverable. You get the report whether or not we ever work together. The server has been telling you the whole time. We just read it back to you.