A backup nobody has restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup

Almost every business we take on says it has backups. Far fewer can tell us the last time anyone restored from one. Those are not the same thing. A backup that has never been restored is a hypothesis — a reasonable-looking assumption that quietly fails the first time you actually need it.

The five-minute question

Ask whoever looks after your IT: “If the main server died tonight, how long until we are trading again, and when did we last prove it?” A good answer has a number of hours and a recent date. A bad answer has a shrug.

What we actually do

• Local appliance plus an offsite copy, so a fire or a flood does not take both.
• Immutable, air-gapped copies that ransomware cannot reach and re-encrypt.
• Scheduled test restores — with evidence — rather than a green tick nobody checks.
• A written recovery time and recovery point objective, agreed before you need it.

Microsoft 365 counts here too, by the way. Microsoft keeps the service running; it does not keep a recoverable copy of your mail and files against your own mistakes or a compromised account. That is on you — or on us, if you would rather it was.

If you are not sure where your business stands, that is exactly what the free on-site review is for.