Many businesses assume their data is safe simply because they have a backup system in place, but an untested backup is as unreliable as having no backup at all.
Imagine experiencing a system failure, cyberattack, or accidental data deletion—only to find out your backups aren’t accessible or functional. As a result, your business can’t recover important files like customer records and financial data, and you may face significant disruptions to your operations, affecting productivity, revenue and the trust of your clients in your service quality.
IT failures are estimated to cause 25% of cyberattacks – but this outcome doesn’t have to be inevitable if you take proactive action. Testing backups regularly and effectively can help you identify any issues before disaster strikes. In this article, we highlight the risks of skipping backup tests and the best practices for testing your backups to protect your data and maintain your business continuity.
The Consequences of Not Testing Your Data Backup Process
Without consistent and effective backup testing, you may unknowingly miss several issues that could compromise your ability to recover important data in a disaster recovery situation:
- Corrupted backups: Your backup data may be unusable due to overlooked hardware failures, software bugs, or using outdated backup media that has degraded over time.
- Incomplete backups: Your backup process may not be capturing certain files or systems, leaving you without critical data during a restore. This might happen due to misconfigurations in your backup settings, network connectivity issues, insufficient storage capacity, system permission errors or other issues.
- Outdated backup procedures: Your operations have likely evolved and modernized! If your organization hasn’t adjusted its backup procedures recently, they may no longer meet the requirements of your current data environment. You may face critical gaps, such as missing cloud-based data if your backup strategy was built for on-premises systems, insufficient protection against modern threats like ransomware, incompatibility between outdated backup software and newer systems, or non-compliance with evolving security and retention standards.
Best Practices for Ensuring Backup Integrity
If you want to keep your operations running smoothly, even during the unexpected, it’s important to plan ahead to prepare your IT infrastructure for a disaster. Optimizing your backup process is a key part of that process! Here’s how you can rely on backups that are reliable, secure, and ready to restore critical data:
Create a Regular Testing Schedule
To keep your data safe and ensure you’re ready for anything, it’s crucial to set up a regular schedule for testing your backups at the cadence that works for your business. You’ll be able to identify potential issues before they become critical problems and verify that your data is intact, as well as capable of being successfully restored when needed.
Remember, documenting the results of these tests will be important so you can track your backup strategy’s effectiveness over time, spot recurring issues, and make necessary adjustments to improve your processes.
Leverage Automated Testing Tools
Using automated testing tools can really simplify the backup testing process, making it faster and more reliable.
These tools can quickly check backups for any issues like corruption or missing data, all without requiring much hands-on effort. Instead of spending time manually verifying data and restoring sample files, your IT team can offload the heavy lifting – saving them time for other work while helping them conduct consistent testing with fewer chances of human error.
You’ll be able to get instantly and quickly alerted to any discrepancies, so you can fix them right away. Plus, since you can schedule these tests to run automatically, you don’t have to worry about missing a crucial check!
Conduct Full and Partial Restore Tests
When testing your backups, verify whether your entire systems or datasets can be restored from backups to ensure the data will be complete and functional when you need it.
You’ll also want to verify that you can successfully restore specific files or data subsets so that you can target and recover essential information without waiting for a full system restore, which will be helpful for getting your employees back to work as soon as possible without needing to wait for everything to come back online.
During this testing process, you should make sure to include assessing whether your backup medium remains effective. If evidence points to the fact that your storage medium is degrading or is outdated, consider transitioning to more durable storage solutions to further safeguard against the risk of failure.
Simulate various disaster scenarios
Can your backup and recovery plan be executed swiftly and effectively in a real-world emergency? It’s better to find out early than when there is a serious threat.
By recreating realistic situations, such as a server crash, ransomware attack, or power outage, you can assess how well your backups and your employees—perform under pressure. You can check that your team understands the recovery process and can restore data quickly and efficiently without any issues.
These drills expose potential weaknesses in your backup process that might not be obvious during routine testing. For example, you may discover that specific files or systems are challenging to restore promptly or that certain recovery procedures are more complex than you anticipated. Those insights will help you refine your backup and recovery strategy so that your business can bounce back from actual disasters without unnecessary delays.
Quantify and qualify your backup process
Assessing your backup system’s performance doesn’t have to be a guessing game. Your system’s logs can reveal helpful details about issues impacting your backup integrity, and regularly reviewing this information will help you prevent issues from slipping through the cracks.
Reviewing your backup procedures regularly will also be necessary for understanding whether your system functions how you need it to. Your processes need to meet the latest data protection standards to remain effective and reliable.
By doing both—monitoring logs and adjusting your procedures—you’ll be creating a backup system that grows with you, protecting your business against the ever-changing risks of operating a digital-first workplace.
Protect Your Business with Proactive Backup Testing
Proactively testing and refining your backup strategy can increase your likelihood of remaining resilient, no matter what comes your way.
However, managing backups, along with other essential IT maintenance tasks, requires time, expertise, and the right tools. Outsourcing that work to a managed IT services provider can give you the confidence that your backups are not only in place but also tested and ready for recovery.
When you partner with PC Corp, our IT procurement specialists will help you select and implement the right solutions—for your backup data and every other aspect of your digital workplace—tailored to your business needs. Our managed IT services team will also continuously monitor, test, and optimize your entire IT infrastructure, so you can focus on running your business with peace of mind.
Contact us today to learn how PC Corp can strengthen your data protection.
