Business Owner Nag: Test Your Backup
How to make sure your backup will actually do what you want in a catastrophe
Do you have a backup system for your digital life? I’m assuming you do, but if not, please block out two one-hour blocks over the next two weeks to:
Read this article on how to set one up and decide on a system, and
Implement at least one backup mechanism.
This is not the place for optimization paralysis: one imperfect backup is wildly better than no backup.
Okay, for the rest of you, it’s motivational horror story time. It’s 2006. My sweetheart and I have just finished making our first ever police report. Someone climbed up the fire escape and made off with most of our electronics. I feel pretty lucky: we have insurance, and we can ask our parents to float us money for what needs to be replaced before the insurance money comes through. Plus they didn’t take our back-up hard drives, so my thesis is intact!
It will turn out, however, that my partner’s backup was underway, and the hard drive was unplugged at exactly the wrong moment, leaving his digital photo library hopelessly corrupted and us with very few photos of our first year together. This experience is why I am perpetually nagging people to have more than one backup mechanism. (And also why I have dual cloud backups for my photos...)
There’s a step to having reliable backups that IT folks know about, but most of the rest of us don’t do: testing that you really can get your files from your backup. So here’s your homework:
Make a list of sample files you want to test are okay. You want something old, something new, something video, and something with a mildly unusual file extension. My set is: my tax return from three years ago, my favorite cat photo from last week, a video of my 2015 kittens discovering they’re big enough to jump in and out of the bathtub, and whatever Scrivener file I’m most worried about losing.
Test drive each of your back-ups. Can you find and open each of these sample files from each of your back up systems? Can you repeat that without without using your primary computer? (If you don’t have another computer/tablet in your household to try, ask a neighbor or try the library for physical backups or use Zoom/Teams with remote control with a friend for testing cloud backups.)
If you find there’s an issue (and I usually do), fiddle with settings and schedule time to test again in a week to make sure the issue(s) are resolved.
This test process is annoying, but I promise that, if nothing else, doing this annoying thing will make your next computer replacement less frustrating.
Back soon to nag you again,
Kat