TIL how a 2017 conference in Phoenix changed my whole data backup setup

I went to a small tech meetup in Phoenix back in 2017, not expecting much. A guy from a local credit union stood up and told us how they lost 14 years of member records because their 'cloud backup' was actually just synced folders, not versioned snapshots. Someone had deleted a shared drive and the sync wiped it everywhere. That story stuck with me. I went home and tested my own backups by deleting a random folder on purpose, and sure enough, my restore process had gaps. Now I keep 3 copies with one offsite and I test a restore every quarter. It cost me maybe $40 a month extra, but I've caught two partial failures since. Has anyone else had a scare like that from a 'backup' that wasn't really a backup?

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morgan51222d ago

The part nobody talks about is that testing a restore only proves your data comes back, not that the data you get back is actually the version you think it is. I did a restore test once and everything looked fine until I opened a spreadsheet and noticed a formula was missing from a file I edited three weeks prior. Turns out my backup software was silently skipping certain file types when they had permissions errors at the scheduled time, and it just logged it and moved on. So now I keep a little text file with a timestamp and a random word inside my test folder, and I verify that exact file after every quarterly restore. It's a dumb little trick but it catches the quiet failures that standard checks miss.