Have you tested your Backup Solution?

Ok, so with 2009 underway you probably have shelved the final backup tapes from 2008 for safe keeping. If you haven’t, please put them in a safe place and buy replacement tapes for those you just pulled out of circulation. Backup tape rotation can seem tedious, onerous, irrelevant, or even just a pain in your you-know-what, but that’s taking a very short-sighted perspective on the largest insurance policy you have for all of your business’ digital property.
Despite the IT industry’s new found love affair with disk-based backups, tapes based systems are alive and well all over the IT world. However, just like your kids, your backup regime takes proper care and feeding. Here are some key things to do at the start of the new year to ensure safe, reliable backups of your data:
1. Archive the last FULL backup from 2008 in a safe place. Preferably offsite, or in a fireproof safe, or both.

2. Clean your backup tape drive.

3. Retire any tapes older than 2 years and replace any tapes that have been archived (see #1.)

4. Test your backups. Have your IT provider spend some time doing test restores of data to verify that it’s recoverable. It is especially important to try and restore your most critical data/application even if it requires a special project. $2,000 spent to test and verify that you can recover your mission critical applications is most likely less than you spend on your own life insurance each year.
Remember, backups are only useful if they work. To know if they work you need to test them. You don’t want to find out after a disaster that you’ve been swapping blank tapes for the last 6 months.