Why testing backups is important

People often assume they have good backups of important data. When they suddenly need to recover their data, they may not be able to access it, or don’t know how. This is why testing backups is important.

Periodically testing your backups will let you know that:

• your data is being saved correctly
• you can get your data back in a form that you can use
• you know how to get your data back
• you know how long it will take to restore your data.

Developing a testing plan

A backup testing plan is a useful way to make sure you’re testing your backups on a regular basis.

You can make a testing plan in something as simple as a spreadsheet. The plan should include the following information:

• the locations that you have backed up this data – for example, OneDrive, Google Drive, external hard drive, backup server
• the types of data you’ve backed up – for example, financial, staff, teaching plans
• the person responsible for creating the backup and testing it
• the date the backup was created
• how often you’re testing the backup
• the date when the backup was last tested
• the type of test – for example, a single file or the entire system
• the outcome of the test – whether you could successfully restore the backup.

Testing online backups

For Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive backups, we recommend asking your staff to test regularly whether they can access previous versions of their documents and files. These essentially act as your backups.

Microsoft has information about how to restore files on OneDrive.

How to restore deleted files in Microsoft OneDrive – Microsoft

How to restore your OneDrive – Microsoft

Google has information on how to recover and restore files on Google Drive.

How to recover versions of a Google Drive document – Google

How to restore a deleted file in Google Drive – Google

Testing offline backups

If you’re using offline backups (digital backups not connected to the internet), such as an external hard drive or network attached storage (NAS), we recommend testing that you can restore a single file once a week to your computer and testing that you can restore the entire hard drive every 2 months.

Using an information technology (IT) provider or IT lead

If you have an IT provider or an IT lead who is managing your backups, we recommend asking them to develop a backup testing plan. They should demonstrate to you that they’re successfully restoring backups in alignment with this plan.