Wondering how many companies test their backups and how often

As I am a contract PDM Admin we often ask our customers how often they test their SQL and Archive backups. It’s amazing to hear that many companies do not EVER test them. What does the group here think? I’d be interested to hear how often if ever.

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@TomCote45 That’s one of hell of a problem! I think @jmlhunt might have something useful to add here. I vaguely remember talking about backing up archive and SQL db couple of weeks ago.

Thoughts @jmlhunt ?

I’ve tested my SQL backups, but don’t have a set frequency to do so. I suppose it would be a good idea to start doing that more regularly. As for the data backups, we have 4 additional servers that we replicate data to daily and they all perform backups so I’m less concerned about the physical file data being lost.

Now that you’ve brought it up, it would be a good idea to run through and familiarize myself with a full system restore prior to actually needing to for our production environment. These are all good points.

As for the IT side of things, they have a RAID setup to be able to restore failing/failed drives as they become a problem so that failsafe would have to fail completely with multiple failed drives at once in order for an SQL or Data backup to be required.

This is a great discussion!

Personally unless you do a full “all files and all versions” replication I would not rely on the fact that other sites have the data as your backup plan. If you had to restore your vault and use the archive data from one of your other sites, you may find that not all version are in the archive data set from that other site.
Might never happen but something to be aware of.

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