If it hasn’t happened to you already, it will. The realization that important documents, spreadsheets, e-mails, and/or digital photos, are gone forever. It recently happened to a computer technician in Alaska. The technician accidentally wiped, and then formatted a computer hard drive that held 38 billion dollars worth of oil account information. Yes, they made regular backups of the data. Unfortunately, no one tested the backup tapes, and because you are reading about it here, you probably have already guessed, the backups were unreadable. So every piece of information had to be re-entered by hand, it took six weeks and a lot of overtime. The final tab was over $200,000.

The lesson here is obvious; don’t just trust that your backup system will work. Test it regularly, before you really need it.