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CY6Check Your Six

Your backups are running. That is not the question.

Green ticks on a backup dashboard measure whether a job completed, not whether your firm can get back to work. Two numbers matter more.

4 min readAny owner who has been told backups are handled

Ask a firm about backups and you will usually be shown a dashboard of green ticks. The ticks are real. They mean a job ran and did not error. They say nothing about whether the data is usable, complete, or reachable on the worst day.

The two numbers

How much work can you afford to lose, measured in hours? And how long can you be unable to work, measured in hours? Every technical decision follows from those two answers, and both are business decisions rather than IT ones.

A firm that can lose four hours of work and be down for one day needs a very different arrangement from a clinic with patients arriving at nine. Neither is wrong. What is wrong is not knowing which one you have bought.

What to ask for

  • The date of the last successful test restore, and what was restored.
  • Where the off-site copy lives, and whether it can be deleted by someone who compromises your network.
  • Whether your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace data is backed up separately. It usually is not, and the platform's retention is not a backup.
  • How long a full restore of your main system actually takes, measured rather than estimated.

If nobody can name a date for the last test restore, treat the backup as untested. That is not pessimism, it is just what the word means.

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Not sure where you stand?

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