 So anyone who has ever made Technology videos on YouTube for any length of time has probably made one about how important it is to back up your computer now Some people have made proactive videos where they preach about how important backups are some people Talk about how backups are important after they had something horrible happen no matter what the circumstances are There are approximately, you know a million videos out there give or take, you know a million About how important backups are you you've heard about how he's having one on site and having one in the cloud and Whatever backups are important We all agree on the fact that backups are important Everyone knows this even if you don't have backups you realize that they're important because you are kind of living on the edge You know that there's a possibility that Sometime in the future something's going to go wrong with your computer and you're gonna lose data You know that that's a possibility and you choose to not have back backups right or if you have backups you live the Ideal every single day you make yourself a backup, you know, you've built yourself an automated backup system However, it may work whatever happens to be you have backups and you deserve credit for that It's very very good that you've gotten that far and it's a position where everyone should be everyone should have backups and You're probably quite tired of the fact that everyone preaches about having backups But there's an aspect to your backup system that a lot of people Especially those who don't work in IT are probably missing and that is testing your backups This is probably just as important as actually having backups. So what do I mean by this basically? Actually having backups is only have half the problem So you set up a system where your system or your server or whatever it is backs itself up To a certain point on a certain frequency of time. So whether it's, you know, every day every week every month Whatever it happens to be you've set that up You've set it so that those backups are stored in several different places So they're all they're all safe and secure and you have no chance of them Losing or at least very little chance of you losing them, right? So that's half the story and that's usually where the vast majority of us Regular people actually stop but there's an extra step that is just as important and that is testing your backups You want to ensure that the backups that you have are Good backups and what I mean by good backups is that I mean that they actually have the data that you want I would want to restore in the event that you've lost your data. So for example Say you have your backup stored in the cloud You want to be able to pull that data back down to your computer easily enough to the point where you can Re-put it onto your hard drives and actually use it locally Not only should that process be easy and fast But it should also work and that means that the data should actually all be there functional and accessible so That means that if you are backing up to a cloud service You have to be able to test the validity validity of that backup in order to make sure that it's Actually good and that if you were to experience data loss you could get it back both swiftly and accurately and That is the second part of the process now it sounds like a tedious piece of work because you basically have to Go in and make sure that the data that you expect to be there is actually there And that your process for restoring your data should you need to do so is in place and actually works It's a tedious process But it is important because there's nothing worse than having backups and not being able to use them If you have all of your data up in the cloud and all of your data sitting on an external hard drive and both of those are Actually bad backups that you can't use then they might as well not even exist it's they're basically useless because you can't access the data on there and Even if the data is partially available to you on those backups It's still less than useful because you're still going to be missing some of the data that you have lost and that means that your backup strategy wasn't a good one so The biggest thing you can do after you've backed up your system is ensuring that the backups that you have are Functional so test your backups and there are like are any number of ways you can do this You can do a full restore on your system using the backup data You can do a data audit where you can go in and test random Data points inside of the data set and making sure that all the data that you're looking for is actually there That's one reasonable way of doing it. It's not 100 obviously. It's not 100% But you you could do that and you also need to test the the Restore mechanism that you have in place So the best way to do this is to actually pull the data down and do a full restore so that you know that when you do restore You can actually Have access to the data that you need whether you do a full restore and a VM or whatever it happens to be You want to make sure that when you restore to a system that the data that you need is there so you need to test every aspect of the Whole backup process from backing up all the way to Restoration to make sure that everything is not only there But that it works properly in the end because like I said, you don't want to be left with your pants down Having backups, but them being completely useless. It'd be it's just it's a horrible feeling because you feel safe like if you've made Your backups you have your backup strategy in place and you're really proud of yourself You know you're maybe you're backing up to Borg base or something like that And you also have an external hard drive. So, you know, you have your your backups in two different places So you feel safe and secure in that situation and then you lose your data and you pulled on your work base repository and It's borked, you know You know half the data is either not there or you didn't back up all of the data that you needed to back up or You forgot the encryption key or whatever it happens to be whatever the problem is you know, you are in this situation you had felt safe and security but secure but the Restoration process didn't go the way it needed to go and you still have lost all your data Therefore rendering your entire backup strategy in the crapper because you didn't test your backups. So Pro tip test your backups ensure that the restoration process you that you have is works and that the data that you want to have Backed up is actually backed up the way it's supposed to be so That's your pro tip for the day if you have thoughts on this you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on mass down our odyssey those links to be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast links for libera pay and YouTube will be in the video description as well I also now do a weekly Podcast for my patrons. It's going to be patreon exclusive both on YouTube and patreon. So if you want to find out some Random thoughts is this kind of a rambly podcast. Those are available to all tiers of my my subscribers So check that out either on patreon on YouTube or on YouTube So thanks everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube because they're all absolutely amazing without you the challenge It's not me anywhere near where it is right now. So thanks so very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it Without thinking Thank you so much. Thanks every for watching. I'll see you next time Very eloquent there Matt. I do appreciate you stumbling back in