The backup you never tested isn't really a backup
Most small businesses think they're backed up until the day they need it. Here's how to check yours actually works, before it matters.
Here’s an uncomfortable question: if your website disappeared tonight — hacked, broken by an update, or wiped by a hosting mistake — could you get it back by tomorrow?
Most people answer “yes, I’ve got backups.” And most of the time, they’re half right. There is a backup somewhere. What nobody has ever done is check that it actually restores. That gap is where small businesses get badly caught out.
Why “I have backups” isn’t the same as “I’m safe”
A backup is only useful if it does three things:
- It exists — something is genuinely being saved.
- It’s recent — a copy from a year ago won’t help much.
- It restores — the saved copy can actually rebuild a working site.
That last point is the one almost everyone skips. Backups fail silently all the time: a scheduled job quietly stopped months ago, the files are corrupted, or the copy is missing the database that holds all your content. You don’t find out until the worst possible moment.
An untested backup is a promise nobody has ever checked. The day you need it is a terrible day to discover it was empty.
A five-minute check you can do today
You don’t need to be technical to ask the right questions. If someone looks after your site, ask them:
- Where are my backups stored? They should be somewhere separate from the site itself. A backup that lives on the same server disappears with it.
- How often are they taken? Weekly is a sensible minimum for most small sites; more often if you update regularly.
- When did we last actually restore one? If the answer is “never,” that’s the real risk, not a technical detail.
If you run the site yourself, the same three questions apply. Many hosting providers include backups, but “included” and “tested” are not the same thing.
What a proper safety net looks like
For the businesses I look after, backups aren’t a box I tick once. They’re taken on a schedule, kept somewhere separate, and — the important bit — periodically restored to confirm they genuinely work. It’s the difference between hoping and knowing.
None of this is exciting. You’ll never think about it on a good day. But on the one bad day, it’s the difference between a minor hiccup and losing weeks of work and every enquiry that came in while you were down.
If you’re not certain your backups would actually save you, that’s worth an hour of someone’s time to check properly. Send me a message and I’ll help you find out — before you need to.