The backup you’ve never tested isn’t a backup
Almost every firm we review has copies of its files. Far fewer have ever put one back. The gap between those two things is where bad weeks come from.
Ask an owner whether their files are backed up and the answer is almost always yes. Ask when someone last restored one, and the room goes quiet. That pause is the actual finding, and we hear it in most reviews we do.
A copy you have never put back is a promise, not a plan. It might be missing the one folder that matters. It might have quietly stopped running in March. It might take eleven days to bring back, which is fine for a photo library and ruinous for a practice with clients waiting.
What we actually check
During a review we ask four plain questions, and we ask for the answers in hours rather than adjectives:
- How many copies exist, and is one of them somewhere a bad Friday cannot reach?
- When did somebody last take a file out of one and open it?
- If everything went at once, how many hours until people are working again?
- How much work would be lost — an hour of it, or a day of it?
Owners can rarely answer the last two. That is not carelessness. Nobody ever sold them a number; they were sold a service and left to assume the rest.
The fix is unglamorous
We put the copies where they belong, keep one of them out of reach, and then restore something on a schedule and write down how long it took. That is the whole practice. It is dull, it takes an afternoon a quarter, and it turns a hope into a number you can say out loud to your insurer.
If you would like to know your own number, that is one of the four things we look at in a review. You keep the report either way.