A Backup You've Never Restored Is Not a Backup

We've watched a client open a year of nightly backups and find every single one was an empty file. The cron job had been failing silently for eleven months and nobody checked, because nobody ever needed one until that day.

Two questions decide your plan

How much data can you afford to lose — an hour, a day, a week? And how long can you be down while restoring? Answer those honestly and the backup schedule and cost follow logically. Most businesses over-buy on one and under-buy on the other.

Rules that actually hold

• Keep a copy somewhere other than the server it came from
• Automate it — manual backups stop the week someone gets busy
• Alert on failure, not just on success
• Keep several days of history — yesterday may already be corrupted
• Back up uploaded files too, not only the database

Test the restore every quarter

Take a recent backup, restore it to a separate server, and open the system. It takes an hour. That hour is the only thing that turns a backup from a hopeful file into something you can actually rely on.