Back in the days when I was managing editor of PC World and then editor of PC Computing, I used to literally have nightmares about this sort of thing:
Business 2.0, the technology-aware magazine published by Time, periodically reminds readers of the importance of backing up computer files. A 2003 article likened backups to flossing – everyone knows it’s important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.
Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss.
On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine’s editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up.
Good thing the magazine, based in San Francisco, is a monthly. “If it had happened a week later, we would have been in trouble,” said Josh Quittner, the editor.
There were hard copies of edited articles, because they had been sent out for legal review, but the art department had to rebuild every graphic element and redo every layout by hand.
How does this happen? Because everyone assumed the backup system was working and never tested its document recovery features.
There’s a lesson for you.
Ed Bott 
Ed:
What is your backup system?
Trackback: Every IT Manager’s Nightmare: No Tested Recovery.
Thanks for pointing that out Ed.
Philip E.
Richard, that’s a big question! Short answer: I currently use TrueImage Home 10 to keep image based backups of all systems. I use AllwaySync to keep music, photos, and data files backed up to an external hard drive. I use Offline Files in Windows Vista to keep mirrors of my important working files from my main machine to a notebook. And I now have Windows Home Server set up to do full backups of all computers in my home and office.
I might have to do a post on this…
Short answer: YES. The first thing I did after running a backup with Vista was attempt to recover files. No backup is worth anything if you can’t do anything with the backups!
I’m rather surprised that nobody has mentioned Robocopy which now comes stand alone on Vista.
For XP users theres the XXCOPY (very similar and maybe superior to XP’s Robocopy) freeware (not the same as Microsoft’s Xcopy) and SyncbackSE.
Both verify the copy job, SyncbackSE by default, and XXCOPY with a /V switch.
Robocopy is very useful but I think people are a little intimidated by its range of options. I used SyncToy as a substitute for it and eventually settled on that (although I’ll admit Robocopy has some features that are hard to find anywhere else, like the network-fault-tolerance features).
Ed:
You wrote, “Richard, that’s a big question! Short answer: I currently use TrueImage Home 10 to keep image based backups of all systems. I use AllwaySync to keep music, photos, and data files backed up to an external hard drive. I use Offline Files in Windows Vista to keep mirrors of my important working files from my main machine to a notebook. And I now have Windows Home Server set up to do full backups of all computers in my home and office.
I might have to do a post on this…”
Please do that! I think it would be a great subject.
One issue I have wrestled with, but without deciding what is best is “whether imaging system drives is really worth it?” I keep my data on separate physical drives so that the files can be easily moved from one system to another if the system fails. This means that as long as I have another working computer I am good to go and I have lots of computers so this is no problem. Historically, I have preferred to rebuild a system drive from scratch when its predecessor failed, since images are “always out of date anyway.” This also allows me to consider whether infrequently used applications should be reloaded or killed. But software activation has thrown a big wrench into that method.
My own take on imaging system drives is that it works best when the system drive in question is relatively lean — like my notebook, which I have several images for.