No backups for 9 months?

But they were getting happy emails every day!

Have any of you raised teenagers? We have five that made it through the teenage years and are all doing very well. Has anyone besides me gotten “confusing communications” from their kids? Things like “I turned in the homework” when no such thing happened. Or “I’m getting an A in math class” when the correct answer is some other letter. Or “I’m going to Sarah’s house to?do homework?and I’ll have the car home by 10:00” when it wasn’t really Sarah’s and it was nowhere close to 10:00.

You may be wondering by now what this all has to do with data…and backups…and the like?

A large industrial company called me 5 years ago. They had gotten a virus that wiped out every file on every PC…disastrous for a company of 350 employees! Even their servers were blank.

The first thing I did is where anyone would start: I looked at their backups. They were extremely interested in getting their payroll software up and running again. Their state required them to have complete records, and their payroll was stored in a database. I started looking at the backups and came to a horrifying realization: their backup process had not correctly backed up their payroll for 9 months! It had been running three times a day, and it even sent the Operations Manager a “happy” email every day from their cloud provider stating that the backup ran correctly.

What went wrong? Their backup was a two-step process:

1)????? Make an image of the payroll database.

2)????? Send it to the cloud.

Easy enough, right? Well for some reason Step 1 had quit 9 months earlier, and the backup was sending the same old data to the cloud over and over. Nobody was testing the process. Ever.

I was asked to set up a manual entry screen in their payroll program so that senior managers ($$$$) could make 42,000 manual entries to get them caught up. This might have killed a smaller company, but these folks had the resources.

This experience is one of the two that led me to start Verified Backups. (I will save the other for another day.)? When we are backing up this type of data, our program does a full restore test every day. It is the only way to guarantee it worked. And our software also date-checks the backup to make sure it’s not old information. This process earned us a US Patent in 2022.

Let’s talk! Make sure you’re protected.

To book a call with me, please visit https://VerifiedBackups.as.me