You have a backup. When did anyone last put one back?

Ask a room of business owners whether they are backed up and every hand goes up. Ask when anybody last restored something from those backups and the hands come down.

That gap is the whole subject. A backup nobody has ever restored from is not a backup. It is an intention with a monthly charge.

Three things that get called the same thing

Most of the confusion we meet is not about whether to back up. It is that three different arrangements have ended up sharing one word.

Sync copies your files somewhere else and keeps both ends identical. OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive. Identical is the point, and identical is the problem: delete a folder on the laptop and the copy goes too, faithfully, in seconds. Ransomware is the same story at speed. Sync means your files survive a stolen laptop. It does not mean they survive a mistake.

Version history keeps older copies of a file for a window. It is genuinely useful when somebody saves over the wrong thing on a Tuesday and notices on the Wednesday. It is no use at all when the damage was done in March and found in September, because by then the window has closed, and almost nobody has decided how wide that window should be. It came with a default.

A backup is the third thing. A separate copy, made on a schedule, that you can restore from a chosen point in time, held somewhere the original system cannot reach and cannot delete.

Plenty of firms have the first two and believe they have the third.

The test takes half a day

Not a project, not an audit. One afternoon, three restores, a pen.

01Pick three things: one document, one mailbox, and one record from whatever actually runs the business
02Restore each to a scratch location, not over the live copy
03Time it, from asking to usable
04Write down what came back missing

The third one is where the afternoon earns its keep. A document is easy. A mailbox is usually fine. The thing that runs the business, the job diary, the practice system, the database on the PC under somebody's desk, is where the test stops being a formality.

Restore to a scratch location rather than over the top. You are testing the backup, and a test that can damage the live system is a worse risk than the one you are testing for.

What you are actually measuring

Two numbers come out of this, and they are the only two that matter to a director.

How long from "we have lost it" to "we are working again". And how much of the recent past is gone for good, which is really a question about how often the backup runs.

Consultants have acronyms for both. The acronyms do not matter. Being able to say the numbers out loud does, because "we're backed up" is not an answer you can plan around and "half a day, and we would lose since yesterday teatime" is. It might also be an answer you are unhappy with, which is the useful outcome. You now know something you did not know at lunchtime.

A migration is a restore with a deadline. That is why the surprises are always the same ones.

What comes back missing

We have moved firms off on-premises Exchange into Microsoft 365, and an accountancy practice's whole records estate from Digita to IRIS. Doing that work is the fastest education available in what a backup really contains, because you find out under time pressure with people waiting.

The data itself is rarely the problem. What goes missing is everything arranged around it:

Permissions. The files come back and nobody can open them, or everybody can.
The links between records. A list of jobs and a list of clients restore cleanly and no longer know about each other.
Attachments, when the export was built around the current state of a record rather than its history.
Mail rules, shared mailboxes, the address that forwards to three people. None of it is a file, so none of it is in the file backup.
The things nobody counted as data. The scanner's settings. The licence key taped inside a drawer. The one machine that quietly runs a scheduled job at 6am.

None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary furniture of a working business, and it is invisible until the day it is not there.

You may need less than you are being sold

Here is the part a supplier is unlikely to volunteer.

Having tested, some firms find their real exposure is one database on one ageing machine, and everything else is either replaceable or already covered. The proportionate answer is to protect that one thing properly and leave the rest alone. Others find the opposite, and the afternoon pays for itself several times over.

Either way, the test comes before the purchase. Buying a backup product for an exposure nobody has measured is how a business ends up paying monthly for a second copy of the wrong things. That is the same test we would apply to any system decision: what does it cost to do nothing, and is that number bigger than the fix?

If the answer is nobody

The question to take away is not technical. Ask who in the business could get everything back if the person who set it up were unreachable for a fortnight, and what they would need in front of them to do it.

If the answer is nobody, that is the finding, and it is a bigger one than which backup product you use. Everything else is detail.

We will happily tell you the arrangement you already have is adequate, when it is. The first conversation costs nothing, and half a day of testing is the cheapest insurance policy in this business.

We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK.