I have made it a habit nowadays to ask every MSP that I meet the same question – “Do you really think your backups are intact?”
And most of them (surprisingly!) gave me the same answer – “definitely”. Then came my next question – “Would you be comfortable deleting all your data and restoring it from your backups?” It was actually easier to guess the next answer – “No way”
With all due respect, this may be true even in your case. I hear you saying that you have a sophisticated or comprehensive backup system in place. But I really hate to break the news to you that it does not guarantee you eternal and automated business continuity in the unfortunate event of data loss. Because you will never know if it works unless you actually test it. So stop considering regular and consistent backup as a sufficient strategy. It is only a preventive measure that allows you to resume where you left off when the disaster occurred. However restoring all your data to 100% is a challenge that only backup verification can accomplish.
StoreGrid’s Disk Image verification process for a backed up incremental VHD file will undergo three steps of verification – Pre-test, Mount test and Post test.
- Pre-test: Checks whether the VHD file is Compressed or encrypted.
- Mount-test: Attaches VHD and checks whether the volumes have mounted properly.
- Post-test: Runs chkdsk for backed up volumes and automatically boots up VHD in HyperV Virtual machine.
So I hope you understood that a sophisticated backup and recovery solution is not something that just backs up data at regular intervals, it should also perform auto-verification of each and every backup in order to ensure safe recovery of data.
StoreGrid provides a way to be sure that your backups are working by checking if every single data in the original directory has been correctly restored by the backup system. So I urge you to think again! Do you really think your backups are intact?
