Backups are the one thing everyone agrees on and almost nobody tests
The advice has been settled for decades — 3-2-1, keep an offsite copy, automate it so you stop having to remember. And the tooling is genuinely good now: cheap, runs in the background, set it once. So why does data loss still keep happening to people who "have backups"?
The gap isn't the backup. It's the restore. Almost nobody actually tries to pull their files back until the day they have to — and that's the worst possible day to discover the job has been silently failing for eight months, or that the copy is there but you never wrote down how to decrypt it, or that it dutifully backed up the shortcut and not the folder.
An untested backup isn't a backup. It's a belief.
I think the real reason is that backing up has no feedback loop. You get nothing for doing it right — no green light, no reward — and nothing for skipping it, right up until the one time you don't. So every single day it loses to things that hand you something back immediately. Same shape as flossing, or updating your resume while you still have the job: correct, cheap, and permanently postponable because nothing bad happens today.
The fix that works isn't a better tool, it's turning the invisible thing visible — a recurring reminder to delete a file and restore it from scratch, once a quarter. If you can't get it back, you didn't have it.
Anyone actually test their restores, or is it all faith out here?
0 replies