Why do backups need checking every night?

Backups fail quietly. A job can stop running, finish with errors or miss a machine that was switched off, and nothing on anyone's screen changes. Checking every night means a problem is found the morning after it happens, not on the day you need a file back.

Most businesses find out whether their backup works at the worst possible moment. A file has gone, a server has failed or an attack has locked everything, and only then does anyone try a restore. That is the moment the backup is tested for the first time, and too often it is the moment it fails.

What Tora does overnight

Tora is the platform we built to run our service, and for six years one of its jobs has been checking the backups overnight. It does the same job every night, whether or not anything has gone wrong, because a backup that failed last Tuesday looks exactly the same as one that worked until somebody tries to use it.

That check sits alongside the rest of Tora's work, reading every support ticket before an engineer opens it and flagging licences nobody is using. The point is the same in each case: the dull, repetitive checking gets done every time, so our engineers spend their time on what it finds.

A backup only counts if it restores

A backup that has run is not the same as a backup that works. The only proof is a restore, so we test the restores rather than assume them. If the worst ever happens, the recovery plan is already written, already rehearsed and ours to carry out.

The backups themselves run to our own private cloud facility in Nottingham. It has redundant power feeds, backup generators, battery failover and clustered hardware, built so that a failure in one place never becomes an outage in yours. You are welcome to visit and see the equipment your data lives on.

Attackers go after the backups too

Ransomware, which is a kind of attack that locks your files and demands payment to unlock them, does not stop at your live systems. A backup that is permanently connected to them can be locked by the same attack. The National Cyber Security Centre says it has seen numerous incidents where ransomware encrypted not only the original data but also the connected USB and network drives holding the backups. It has also seen attacks compromise connected cloud storage where backups were kept.

Its advice is that at any given time, one or more backups should be offline, so they stay unaffected by whatever hits the live systems. Its principles for ransomware-resistant cloud backups add that you must be able to restore from an earlier version even if later versions have been corrupted, and that alerts should be raised when significant changes are made.

That is why our backup service includes air-gapped storage, a copy kept apart from your live systems so an attack on one cannot reach the other.

What our backup service covers

The overnight check is one part of a wider service. As set out on our business continuity page, it includes:

  • Automated, encrypted backups running on a schedule, without anyone having to remember.
  • Off-site replication copies held away from your premises.
  • Air-gapped storage a copy kept apart from your live systems, out of reach of an attack on them.
  • Recovery testing restores tried and verified before you ever need one.
  • Recovery targets agreed limits for how much data you could lose and how long you could be without a system.

Two numbers every business should know

Every backup plan comes down to two numbers, and both are business decisions rather than technical ones.

  • Recovery point objective how much data you could afford to lose, measured as the time since the last good backup. If the answer is an hour, a nightly backup is not enough.
  • Recovery time objective how long you could afford to be without a system before it seriously hurts the business. That decides how quickly a restore has to be possible.

Agreeing those two numbers first means the backups are built to match the business, not the other way round.

Questions we get asked

Three questions tend to come up once people start thinking about their own backups.

Is Microsoft 365 backed up automatically?

Microsoft keeps its service running and offers recycle bins and retention settings, but they come with set time limits that are shorter than most people expect. A separate backup is what lets you go back further, and restore to a particular point in time.

What does air-gapped mean?

It means a copy of your data that is kept apart from your live systems, so ransomware or a mistake that reaches those systems cannot reach the copy. The National Cyber Security Centre calls this an offline or cold backup.

Can I see where my backups are kept?

Yes. Our clients' backups run to our own facility in Nottingham, and you are welcome to visit it and see the equipment for yourself.

Ask your provider one question

Ask whoever looks after your backups when they last restored something from them, and what was restored. If nobody can give you a date, you do not yet know whether your backup works.