Nerino Petro’s Compujurist has a great post on setting up a backup routine. He titles his post, Don’t be an idiot:Backup your data. The great thing about Nerino’s post is that he gives you concrete suggestions about how to properly set up a backup routine to best protect your data.

One of his best pieces of advice is:

5. Finally, perform a sample or test restore to ensure that your data is actually being backed up. Murphy’s Law of backups provides that your backup will fail when you need it most. One method of doing this is to select several critical files and data types such as your time and billing data and word processing files, renaming several of these files and then doing test restores from the backup data stored on the external hard drive as well as from the online backup service and see if the files will open and if the data appears to be current and correct. Initially, you want to test this with the first backup and then at least biweekly for the first two months. Thereafter, I would recommend doing a test restore at least monthly.

Remember, the purpose of doing a backup is not to backup data. Instead, it is to ensure that you can restore your data if when your hard drive crashes. If you faithfully create a backup routine, but never ensure that it works, you may very well be wasting your time and effort doing your backups.

Follow Nerino’s tips, however, and you will be well on your way to ensuring that you do not lose your data.