The backups everyone thinks they have

Ask any company whether they have backups and the answer is yes. It's always yes. Somewhere, at some point, someone set something up — an external disk, a NAS in the corner, a cloud sync, a checkbox in some admin panel. The box was ticked and the topic was closed.

Here's the question that actually matters, and it's a different one: when did you last restore something from that backup, on purpose, to prove you could?

In our experience the honest answer is usually "never." And a backup that has never been restored isn't a backup — it's a hope with a progress bar.

The ways "we have backups" goes wrong

The backup stopped years ago and nobody noticed. Jobs fail silently: the disk filled up, the password changed, the scheduled task died in an update. Without monitoring, a dead backup looks exactly like a living one — until you need it.

It backs up the wrong things. The system that was important in 2021 is faithfully preserved; the database your business actually runs on today was added later and never made the list.

Sync is not backup. Cloud sync mirrors your files — including the moment ransomware encrypts them or someone deletes the wrong folder. The mirror faithfully reproduces the disaster. A real backup keeps history you can go back to.

The backup lives next to the original. External disk in the same room, NAS on the same network — one fire, one surge, or one attacker with network access takes both. That's not redundancy, it's a matched set.

Restoring was never rehearsed. Even when the data exists, the first-ever restore attempt happens during the emergency — with unfamiliar tools, missing passwords, and the clock running. The worst possible moment to discover the recovery takes three days.

What a grown-up backup looks like

It's not complicated, and it's mostly discipline rather than money: know what must survive, keep at least one copy off-site and offline from the daily network, monitor the jobs so failures announce themselves — and rehearse the restore on a schedule, the way you'd test a fire alarm. The rehearsal is the backup; everything else is preparation.

This is a standard part of our IT systems work, and it's the least visible thing we do — right up until the day it's the only thing that matters. If your honest answer to "when did you last test a restore" is "never," get in touch — the free systems review includes exactly this check, and finding out now is free. Finding out later rarely is.