Your Backup Is Not A Backup Until You Restore It
July 3, 2026 | Business Continuity
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A Completed Job Is Not A Verified Recovery
Almost every organization we assess has backups. A meaningful proportion of them have never restored one. The backup job reports success, the dashboard is green, and everybody assumes the two facts are related.
They frequently are not. Backup jobs succeed while excluding a critical database. Retention silently defaults to a fortnight when the compliance obligation is seven years. Cloud platform data is assumed to be backed up by the platform, which in most cases it is not to the depth people expect.
The failure mode is consistent: the recovery process is discovered to be broken during the exact incident that required it to work, at which point there is no time to fix it and no second copy to fall back on.
Testing does not need to be dramatic. Restore a representative file set monthly. Restore a full system quarterly and time it, because recovery time objective is a number you should be able to state rather than estimate. Document who runs the restore, because in a real incident that person may be unavailable.
An untested backup is a theory. The only meaningful question is not whether the job ran, but how long it takes to get the business working again, and whether anyone has ever actually measured it.
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