Don't be so sure. Unless you regularly check your backups and have them stored off-site, you could be in for a rude awakening.

One way your backups could be in jeopardy is if you store them in your own office.

I was in Seattle on a business trip last week, and called into the office one morning to see how things were going. I got my assistant on the phone and her first words were:

"I'm glad you called! There's water dripping out of the ceiling onto my desk."

"What part of your desk," I asked, hoping it was the side where she keeps some file folders.

"Well, it was leaking on the modem, but I moved that," she replied.

"We don't have a modem. What did the thing that the water was leaking onto look like?"

"It's light gray on top and dark gray on the bottom, like my modem at home."

"Ummm.. That's the backup hard drive. Did it get very wet?"

Now, fortunately, that was not the only backup we had of her computer, so I really wasn't worried. There was a very recent backup safely stored off-site. But if that had been the only backup, and if more water had leaked into the office, we could have been in trouble.

The day after this incident, I was in a meeting where a financial planner was making a presentation. She was doing it without notes or PowerPoint slides because her computer had crashed. For some reason, the backups she had for the computer didn't work either. Unless she got lucky and found a data recovery company that could get the data off her hard drive, all her business records and tools were gone.

Web site backups may also be unusable or non-existent. Years ago, we had a web host who said they did daily backups, but didn't. When we had to call for backup tapes to get some data we had accidentally deleted, the tapes weren't available. We changed web hosts, but since then we do our own monthly backup of all our sites just in case there's ever a problem with the daily and weekly backups our current host does.

So, how can you be sure your backups are safe and your data could be restored if needed?

First, store your backkups off-site. If you're doing your own backups, plan on having a set of disks or tapes that you can rotate so you always have a recent copy off-site.

Call for your backups periodically to be sure they have really been made, and they are readable.

If you're doing weekly and daily incremental backups, be sure you have and store old monthly copies, too. That way if something accidentally gets overwritten on a recent backup, you can go into your old backups to find the files that were lost or damaged.