"We have backups." It is one of the most reassuring sentences in IT — and one of the most misleading. A company had backups configured, running every night, ticking the green report. Nobody had tested them for eight months.
On the day it mattered — a server down, data lost — the restore failed. The backup was running, but onto a partition that had filled up; the last valid files were eight months old. Eight months of work, theoretically "safe", practically unrecoverable.
An untested backup is not a backup — it is an assumption. The difference between the two shows only once, exactly when you cannot afford it. That is why a periodic restore test is included in our maintenance subscription: we don't just check that the backup runs, but that it actually restores.
This article was generated with AI assistance.