Home Forums It's time to get real f&*(g serious about backups

Norm,

I'll give you three reasons to test backups:

1. So you'll actually have working knowledge on how to actually restore your backups. Without this working knowledge, you are at the mercy of tech-support availability and you'll be sitting there praying every step of the way that you understood the instructions you were being giving correctly.

2. To have confidence in your backups. See reason 1.

3. TO HAVE AT LEAST SOME PROOF THEY WORK. Again, I say with conviction, if you haven't restored your backup to another computer to ensure they work then by definition YOU DO NOT HAVE BACKUPS. It's bad enough that even with all the testing in the world, come shat day your backups may not work. But at least with some testing and by going through the process you have at least some assurances and a real fighting chance. Right now, you have nothing.

I haven't used Acronis in 12 years so I cannot speak for it.

You should have your drives in a RAID 1. Never use RAID 0.

Dropbox is not HIPAA compliant. Please execute the person who told you it was.

I recommend two things: Make sure your drives on your server are in a RAID 1 config. And then test your backups by doing an actual restore.

For those of you who have not noticed, I'm no longer in a playful mood when it comes to backups. Starting tomorrow, I'm on my next Crypto recovery and, yet again, the owner of the company is already upset because he doesn't know the status of backups when I asked on the phone today.

And the bad guys want $15,000 this time.

JamesNT