Most clients have backups. Most clients have never restored from them. Those two facts are not in tension on a normal Tuesday. They become very much in tension on the Tuesday it matters.

Our standard is unglamorous: every backup job has a documented restore drill, and that drill runs on a calendar, not on faith. Quarterly we pick a folder — sometimes one we know is fine, sometimes one we know was deleted three months ago and shouldn't be in the recent set — and we restore it. If the drill fails, the backup didn't really exist.

The other thing we measure is time. Every backup vendor in the world advertises capture speed; almost none of them advertise restore speed. For most small businesses, the difference between a four-hour outage and a four-day outage is whether somebody timed a restore before the bad day happened.

" Every backup vendor advertises capture speed. The metric you actually care about is time-to-restore.

— Your Tech Department, January 2026