Backup remains one of the pillars of IT resilience. Yet it's often poorly understood or poorly verified. Many organizations discover its limits at the worst possible moment: during restoration.
Common mistakes
- Never testing restorations
- Keeping all backups in the same location
- Forgetting critical configurations
- Not monitoring job failures
- Insufficiently protecting backup repositories
Recommended approach
- The 3-2-1 rule: multiple copies, on multiple media, with one off-site
- Regular testing: verify actual restorability
- Segmentation: isolate the backup infrastructure
- Logging: track job successes and failures
A strategic view
Backups should be designed around business needs: acceptable restoration time, tolerable data loss, and service criticality.
The real value of a backup isn't measured when it's created, but when it's successfully restored.