Sense with Cents

Nearly every day, a customer contacts me for help recovering data. Most have discovered — at the worst possible moment — that they have no usable backup.

The most common situation: they back up only to their main computer. No online backup, no removable media. When the computer fails, the backup fails with it. Others simply believe that their software, or “their computer,” is making backups for them automatically. It may be, or it may not be — but they have never checked.

This is why I believe that one backup, or any number of untested backups, is actually worse than no backup at all. With no backup, you know where you stand. With an untested backup, you have false hope — and false hope is dangerous. You won’t take the problem seriously until it’s too late.

If you are not testing your backups, there is little point in even making them.

A real backup strategy has three parts. First, you need more than one copy, in more than one place. A backup on the same machine as your data is not a backup — it’s a copy that will likely disappear at the same time as the original. Second, your backup needs to be current. A backup from six months ago may be better than nothing, but it is not a backup strategy. Third, and most importantly: you must test your backup. A backup you have never restored from is an untested assumption. At some point, assumptions fail.

For payroll specifically, losing your data mid-year is not just an inconvenience — it means reconstructing every payroll run, every tax deposit, every employee record from the beginning of the year. That is a recoverable situation, but it is painful and time-consuming. A tested, current, offsite backup makes it a non-event. It is also worth noting that a good backup only helps if you can actually restore to working software — another reason to keep your software current.

If you are using Medlin Payroll, you will be reminded once a month to use the included secure online backup storage — at no extra cost. You can also make a local backup at the same time, preferably on removable media such as a memory stick. That gives you both an offsite copy and a local copy in one step.

Medlin also takes extra care to make sure your backup actually contains all of your data. This matters more than most people realize. Some backup software does not capture everything it should. And when a computer expert moves your data to a new computer, it is not uncommon for some files to be left behind — sometimes without anyone noticing until something goes wrong.

A backup is only as good as it proved itself to be the last time you tested it. Testing means more than just confirming the files are there. You need to actually restore the backup to a temporary folder, then examine the data — print some reports, open some records, verify that what you see matches what you expect. That tells you two things: that your backup is complete, and that you know how to restore it when it counts. Knowing how to restore a backup is just as important as having one.