- [Narrator] Backups play a crucial role
in an organization's disaster recovery strategy.
But it's surprising how often organizations
fail to properly test those backups
to verify that they were completed properly,
and that they're ensuring the continued availability
of critical business information
in the event of a disaster.
One of the most important data protection
actions that you can take
is regularly verifying your backups
to ensure that they're functioning properly.
There are several different types
of backup tests that you should perform.
First, all modern backup software has
built-in verification mechanisms.
You can use these mechanisms to validate
that the backup was successful
immediately after creating the backup.
This is just the bare bones of backup verification
because you are relying upon the software
that performed the backup
to tell you that it worked properly.
However, it's amazing how many organizations
have this verification feature turned off,
either because they never bothered
to turn it on in the first place,
or because they felt that it took
too long to complete the backups
with verification turned on.
Another mistake that organizations commonly make,
even when they do have backup verification turned on,
is that they don't ever look at the logs
where backup errors are recorded.
You should configure alerts from backup software
to trigger notification the System Administrators
when a backup fails.
Better yet, have any error automatically create
an incident in your IT service management system.
Even better, use code that verifies
that the backup report was received each day,
so that if the backup fails silently, you still find out.
In addition to using the built-in verification mechanisms,
you should perform regular tests
of your backup restoration capabilities.
There's no better test than actually attempting
to perform a restore to see
that your backups are working properly.
A simple test is just asking for the restoration
of a single file from a specific date.
An IT Manager, or someone else not directly
involved in the backup process,
should randomly select a file and a date,
and then, ask the Backup Administrator
to restore that file from that date.
It's a good idea to do this on a regular basis
to verify that the restore mechanism functions properly.
A more sophisticated test that you should
perform periodically is restoring a server
or an entire service from backup.
This simulates a real disaster scenario,
where you are forced to rebuild a system from backups.
Both of these tests provide Backup Administrators,
IT Managers, and business leaders
with the confidence that the backup mechanisms
are functioning properly and the business
will be able to restore operations
in the event of a critical disaster.