Backup verification

Have you ever suffered a project delay due to data loss or equipment failure? Did you ever hear of someone trying to recover files from a backup, only to find that the backup hadn't been working?

At Type A, daily backups of every server and every employee laptop is a given. But we go a step further and test our backups, with the help of an automated "fire drill" system in which our whole team participates. This biweekly test gives us 26 chances each year to verify that our backup systems are working and will be there when we need them.