Does your backup actually work?

Some weeks ago, we published a blog about the “time-honored” 3-2-1 rule when backing up. One of our partners responded to this blog with the fair comment that testing the restore is just as important. This is certainly true and we are happy to tell you more about it, because here too, with the increasing use of the cloud, there are some snags.

Testing!

A backup whose restore does not work is worthless. After all, backup is all about always being able to restore. But. You can only guarantee that if you test the restore. And it does. But many companies and organizations today place their backup in the cloud. Writing data away to the cloud is not expensive, but reading that same data back can become a costly affair. Those who want to test their backup on a regular basis thus incur considerable costs. Of course, there are plenty of IT managers who will say that backup is used only on rare occasions. But even then, you will have to make sure that that backup works.

High cost?

How can you test the restore without incurring high costs to retrieve from the cloud your backup? For example, you can take a small backup and try to restore it. At least that’s affordable. Or test whether you can restore your cloud backup to on-premises storage and do an entire restore from there. But there are also government agencies and other companies that find that a restore with a portion of the data is not enough to test the restore. They rightly assume that all data should be transferred properly, not just a small portion.

On premise

Consequently, there are plenty of organizations that choose to store backup on premise. At least testing then becomes a lot cheaper. Either way, it is a necessary condition to test a restore and then ask the question of what costs (may) be incurred in return. On top of that, restoring from the cloud can take quite a while. After all, you depend on connection speed to download. Experience has shown that it is not unusual for such a restore from the cloud to take two weeks.

Need advice? At Comex, we offer no-obligation help and good advice!