The Backup That Was Never There

AV Services · avservices.in · Linux Infrastructure, Mumbai · Since 1999

The call came in on a Tuesday morning.

A jewellery manufacturer in Mumbai — 500-odd employees, a factory running full shifts — had lost their Linux server. Not a crash. Not a hack. Someone had accidentally formatted the drive running their ERP. Transactions, inventory, production records. Gone.

The first thing they asked was: what about the backup?

The backup job had been running every night for months. Green status. No alerts. Nobody had ever done a restore test — why would they, the job was completing successfully. What they didn’t know was that the destination folder had a permissions error. The job ran. It wrote nothing. For months.

So there was no backup. There had never been a backup. Just a cron job completing silently into a void.

This is the part that stays with me about that job.

The MD wasn’t angry about the formatted drive. Accidents happen. He was angry about the backup — because someone had told him, at some point, that backups were running. And they were. The job was running. The files just weren’t there.

That distinction matters. A backup job running and a backup working are two completely different things. Most businesses have one. Almost none have the other.

The recovery took multiple site visits. Data forensics on the formatted volume, partial reconstruction, full ERP restoration. It worked. The cost was Rs.33,000 — which, honestly, was underpriced for what it involved. The correct rate for that job is Rs.75,000 to Rs.1,50,000.

A monthly retainer at Rs.15,000 would have caught the permissions error in the first audit. The restore test we run every month would have flagged it on day one. The incident wouldn’t have happened.

The retainer is now in place.

If you run a business on a Linux server — ERP, billing, inventory, anything — there’s one question worth asking your IT person today:

When did we last actually restore from the backup?

Not “is the backup job running.” Not “when did the backup last complete.” When did someone pull a file, or a database, or a full volume, from the backup and confirm it works.

If the answer is “I’m not sure” or “we haven’t” — you don’t have a backup. You have a backup job.

Those are not the same thing.

AV Services manages Linux servers on monthly retainer for businesses in Mumbai and across India. Every retainer includes monthly backup restore testing. If you want someone to check whether your backup actually works, start with a free 30-minute audit call — no access needed, no commitment.