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Here’s a simple one question test for whether you have good backups or not.

Question: If any of your main hard disks started making a loud clicking sound right now does that idea freak you out or make you nervous?

If you have any answer beside, “No, bring it on” then your backups aren’t good enough.

Simple. I KNOW that I can wipe my HOME directory from my main system and be completely fine. There is the backup from last night on another machine that I can restore easily. If I really need access, those files are available while on the other machine too. Further, there are 90 days of incremental backups available, so if I delete something important and don’t miss it for a few weeks, I can still get it back. Honestly, I’m less confident about some other system backups, but my main desktop computer and all the company server machines don’t cause me any worry at all. I’m 100% confident. Sure, it could be a hassle, but a few hours later, the data would be back. That’s the point of backups, right? Sometimes, about 2 times a year, one of my system backups fail or get corrupted in some way. As long as that doesn’t happen on the same night that the source system has a failure, I’m fine.

For really important data, there are multiple copies on multiple systems, so even if there is some corruption, there are other copies available. Worst case, I could loose 2 days of data, but not everything. I’d restore the OS, applications, application settings AND the data. Because we use virtualization, we aren’t tied to specific hardware … pretty much any current machine can be used to restore onto. There’s no need to search for a specific RAID controller or motherboard or … whatever. Virtualization frees us from that stuff.

Of course, much of my confidence comes from actually performing restores and seeing them work. While we all say to practice the restore, most people don’t have a spare machine to try it out. I know we don’t, but every once in a while, an accident happens and a restore is the quickest answer.

Shouldn’t you be that confident about your backups too?

21 of the Best Free Linux Backup Tools – but this list doesn’t include my favorite, rdiff-backup. Sniff, sniff.
Lifehacker Backup – For anyone running Windows7, just use the built-in backup tool. It is very good and behaves much like rdiff-backup. For Windows Servers, open your wallet and check out Netbackup or EMC Networker. For VMware backups (ESX/ESXi), Trilead VMX is fairly inexpensive as far as VM backup tools go, but it doesn’t support incremental backups.