Causes of Backup Failure June 18, 2012

by Greg Johnson

There are a variety of reasons why a backup may fail to provide a useful recovery:

• The correct files weren’t being backed up.
• The backup was on a schedule, but nobody ever checked to make sure it was still running.
• The backup file is corrupted.
• The last known good copy of a file to be recovered was overwritten when the daily backup ran because it presumed you wanted a backup of your current files and it doesn’t keep revisions.
• The data files were backed up, but the operating system, program files, and configuration information was lost. So, everything needed to be reinstalled from scratch.

The backup procedure we recommend addresses the above issues.