Your backup is not a backup until you have restored from it

Almost every business I assess tells me the same thing early in the conversation: yes, we have backups, that is handled.

Then I ask a follow-up question. When did you last restore from one?

The answer is usually silence.

A backup job is not a recovery capability

A green tick in a backup console means a job completed. It does not mean the data is complete, that it is restorable, or that anyone knows the procedure to bring a system back.

I have opened backup sets that had been running successfully for over a year and excluded the one database the business actually ran on. The job reported success every single night.

The two numbers that matter

Strip away the technology and business continuity reduces to two questions.

How much work can you afford to lose? If your last usable backup is from midnight and the failure happens at four in the afternoon, you have lost a day of production data. Everything re-entered by hand, if it can be recovered at all.

How long can you afford to be down? Not the optimistic estimate. The real figure, including sourcing replacement hardware, rebuilding, restoring, and verifying.

Most owners have never been given these two numbers. They are entirely knowable, and until you know them you are guessing.

What to do this week

Ask whoever manages your IT to restore one meaningful file from last month to a separate location, in front of you. Not a screenshot of a console. An actual restored file you can open.

If that cannot be done quickly, you have found your answer — and you have found it on a quiet week rather than during an outage.