Test your backups

First the "Hello World" of blog posts about backup:

"You do backups don't you?"

There, moving on:

Raymond Chen, in his year end round up of links, () points to an old article which describes a policy of randomly restoring one file a week from backup.

I think that this simple idea is astoundingly useful. Whether you use Mozy (didn't realize they'd been bought by EMC. Hooray!) or Time Machine or burning DVDs (which you keep off site, right?), you can never be sure that you're really backing up the files you want, and that even so, they're really, really, really backed up.

You don't want the first time you test your restore (and therefore your backup process) to be after a system failure.

I'm reminded of how - long ago - at Watermark we evaluated a nifty backup solution that used a jukebox CD burner for backup.

It seemed awesome: good UI, excellent drivers, well written manual. Apart from the manual didn't describe any restore process. At all. And the UI had absolutely no reference to any restore functionality.

We returned the box.