Today is officially the start of summer – so while you are enjoying your day off (Happy Memorial Day to you) and thinking towards your much deserved vacation, I’d like you to take a moment to think about something that never gets a day off or a vacation: your automated backup solution.

Truth is your backup solution may decide that it wants a vacation — it could even be taking one right now — and it won’t submit a leave request or call in like other diligent employees. It’s just gonna stop showing up, and chances are you won’t notice until you’re really in need of it. Automated backup solutions fail for several reasons, including fatal errors and lack of space.

So take this as an opportunity to verify and audit your backup solutions. When was the last full backup of your database? Where are these stored? When was the last full backup that is stored offsite? Are the differential backups working? Are report and image files also part of the backup? If you have an IT Department managing you back-up solutions, take them the extra pie from the picnic, and ask them to verify that all of the solutions are working. Have them restore files (to an empty database or fileshare) to prove it.

An ideal solution creates a full backup of the TMS database once a week, with daily differentials. The TMSThes database needs a full backup once a month. A couple times a year, you should archive those full backups to archival media. Files should be part of a daily backup strategy.

Today is a national day of remembrance – proactively verify that your backups are working properly so you don’t have to add your lost data to those being remembered today.