February is when backup plans meet reality.
It happens every year. Tax prep starts. Auditors ask for historical files. Someone needs an email from last spring. A controller requests a restore rather than a report.
That is when many small businesses discover a hard truth: their backups exist, but they do not work the way they thought they did.
Backups Rarely Fail During an Attack
This surprises people. Most backup failures do not show up during ransomware or outages.
They show up during restore attempts. February is when most businesses try. Year-end closeouts, compliance checks, and tax documentation force organizations to retrieve old data. That is when gaps surface fast.
The backup job ran. The storage looks full. The dashboard is green.
Then the restore fails...
“We Back Up Microsoft 365” Usually Means “We Hope It’s There”
One of the most common February discoveries involves Microsoft 365.
Email, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams feel permanent. They are not.
Microsoft protects its infrastructure. It does not protect your business from deletions, corruption, malicious activity, or retention gaps. Cloud sync is not a backup. Version history is not a recovery plan.
We regularly see organizations assume their data is protected because it lives in the cloud. February is when someone tries to retrieve a file from six months ago and realizes it is gone.
Ransomware-Safe Backups Are Different on Purpose
Another issue that shows up during restore testing is immutability.
Basic backups can be encrypted or deleted by attackers if they gain enough access. Ransomware-safe backups are designed to prevent that, even if credentials are compromised.
If a backup can be modified, erased, or encrypted, it is not a recovery system. It is a copy.
The difference matters when timing matters.
Why This Is a Trust Problem, Not a Technology Problem
Backup failures often come down to assumptions.
Someone trusted that backups were being tested. Someone trusted that restores had been verified. Someone trusted that cloud data was covered. No one checked until February forced the issue.
Attackers exploit the same pattern. They assume no one is testing until it is too late.
What Actually Reduces the Risk
Reliable recovery requires more than storage.
It requires:
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Regular restore testing, not just job completion
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Verification that SaaS data is protected independently
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Backups that cannot be altered by compromised accounts
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Clear recovery time expectations that match business reality
These are operational questions, not theoretical ones.
The Bottom Line
Backups that cannot restore are worse than missing backups. They create confidence that does not exist.
February is when that confidence gets tested.
At Solve iT, restore testing is included in our free threat assessment. It is faster and far less stressful than discovering a failure during an incident or an audit.
If you want to know whether your backups will actually carry you through a bad day, that assessment is the right place to start.
