Why Your Backup Isn’t a Backup (Unless You’ve Tested It)

Let’s get one thing straight: having a backup doesn’t mean you’re safe. It means you’ve potentially saved your data — if everything works the way you hope it will.

But hope isn’t a strategy.

We’ve seen it more than once: a company thinks they’re covered, only to find out during a real-world failure that their backups are missing, outdated, or completely unreadable. That’s why we always say: "If you haven’t tested it, it’s not a backup — it’s a gamble."

Don't gamble with your backup

What Can Go Wrong?

• Backups silently failing due to bad credentials or full storage

• Files skipped because someone moved them out of the backup directory

• Corrupted images that won’t restore properly

• Backups saved to the same machine you’re backing up (yep, we’ve seen it)

So What Is a Good Backup Strategy?

• Automated backups that run on a schedule

• Offsite or cloud storage in case of local disaster

• Regular restore tests — yes, we mean actually clicking the “restore” button

• Retention policies that let you recover data from days, weeks, or even months ago

If that sounds like a lot, don’t worry — this is the kind of thing we handle all the time with backup solutions from Arcserve, Acronis, Carbonite, NinjaOne and others. We monitor, test, and verify backups for our clients so they’re not caught off guard.

Because when your systems go down, your backup shouldn’t join them.