A backup that has never been restored is a guess, not a backup. The single most common failure we have seen in backup planning is not forgetting to back up at all. It is discovering, in the middle of an actual emergency, that the backup is damaged, incomplete, or restores into a state nobody expected. We design our backups around the restore, not only around the saving step.

Setting up automatic nightly backups is the easy half of the job. The half people usually skip is automatically proving that each backup actually restores correctly, by building a throwaway copy of the environment, restoring into it, and running a basic check, on a schedule, with no person needing to remember to do it by hand. A backup process with no automatic proof step is a backup process you do not actually know works, no matter how confident it feels.

How long we keep daily, weekly, and monthly backups is driven by what the business and any compliance rules actually require, not by however much disk space happens to be free that month. We decide retention on purpose, daily backups for two weeks, weekly for three months, monthly for a year, as one example, and we enforce it with automatic cleanup, instead of letting backups pile up until a disk full warning forces a rushed cleanup.

A backup stored on the very same server as the database it protects survives a human mistake or a software bug, but not a hardware failure, or an attack that touches the whole machine at once. Our backups always land somewhere physically and logically separate from the production server, a different machine, a different account, ideally a different provider entirely, or the backup plan is only really protecting against part of what can actually go wrong.

Knowing you have a backup is different from knowing how long it actually takes to bring a system back up from it. We measure restore time under realistic conditions on a regular basis, because a backup plan that takes six hours to restore is a completely different level of business risk compared to one that takes twenty minutes, and we want to know which one we actually have before an emergency, not during it.

A database backup carries the same sensitive data as the live database, sometimes more, since old, deleted records can sit inside older backups long after they are gone from production. We encrypt every backup while it is stored, especially anything kept outside our own servers or with an outside provider, since this is the baseline we expect for any system holding personal or financial data.

Maybeach Tech designs and tests backup and recovery plans for production systems. Get in touch and let us verify yours actually restores.