Would your backups restore?
1 min read
Most businesses have backups of some kind. Far fewer have ever tried to get something back from them. That gap is where the trouble starts, because a backup has exactly one job, and you usually find out whether it can do it at the worst possible moment.
Three ways backups quietly fail
- They stopped running. A password changed, a disk filled up or a subscription lapsed, and the job has been failing silently for weeks.
- They cover the wrong things. The server is backed up, but the files people work on every day live in OneDrive or on laptops.
- They can’t be restored in time. The data is there, but getting it back takes days the business doesn’t have.
Microsoft 365 is not a backup
Microsoft keeps your email and files available, but its retention settings are not the same as a backup you control. If someone deletes a folder, or ransomware encrypts files that then sync to OneDrive, you may need a separate copy to recover cleanly. A dedicated Microsoft 365 backup closes that gap.
How to check yours this week
- Ask for the date of the last successful backup of every system, not just the main server.
- Pick one real file from a month ago and restore it. Time how long it takes.
- Confirm at least one copy is stored somewhere separate from your office and your main cloud account.
- Find out who is alerted when a backup fails, and check those alerts are arriving.
If the honest answer to any of those is “I’m not sure”, that is the finding. It is far cheaper to discover it now than during an outage.