A FREE ONE-PAGE CHECKLIST  |  JAMES OTTO GRAY

The 5 checks I run before I trust a backup

I spent ten years testing whether people were actually ready. Here is the same test, for the laptop your business lives on.

 

For thirty-one years I was with the Salem Fire Department. The last ten of those I was Division Chief of Training, which meant my job was not putting out fires. My job was proficiency testing — finding out, in advance and on purpose, whether the people and the equipment could actually do the thing when it mattered.

Here is what that job teaches you, and it took me a while to apply it to my own desk:

I run an internet business now. Everything it is worth is on my computer. And when I finally sat down and asked whether I could actually get it all back if the machine died tonight, the honest answer was that I did not know. I assumed. That is not the same thing, and I of all people should have known better.

So I wrote down the checks. Five of them. They take about twenty minutes and you can run every one of them yourself on whatever you already have — I am not asking you to buy anything to do it.

One of them is the check almost nobody has ever run, and it is the one that decides whether what you have is a backup or just a feeling.

What's in the checklist

•  The one check that tells you whether your backup is real — and why having it is not the same as having tested it

•  Where the second copy has to be, and why "in the cloud" is not automatically an answer

•  The question that catches the setup that quietly stopped running months ago

•  The device almost everybody forgets, even though it is the one most likely to get lost or stolen

•  The five-minute exercise that tells you what you would actually need first tomorrow morning

It is one page, and it is yours whether or not you ever buy anything from me.

Send me the checklist

Sign up free with your Google or Microsoft account — no card, no cost.

Since you'll ask: I use a $9.97 service, and no, that isn't a typo

I will tell you the thing people say to me, because it is the same thing I thought.

The backup I settled on costs $9.97 a month for 6 terabytes across six separate accounts. When I tell people that, a fair number of them decide it must be junk. Cheap means cheap. I understand the instinct. I sold industrial property for twenty-six years and I would have thought the same thing.

So here is the arithmetic instead of an argument. What the same shape of thing costs elsewhere, from the companies' own pages:

Apple sells the same amount of storage, shared with the same number of people, for three times what I pay. Apple is not a cheap company selling junk. Which tells you the price gap is not a quality gap — it is a margin gap.

And I will be straight with you about the part that does not flatter me: Microsoft is priced competitively at $12.99, and if you already pay for Microsoft 365 you may not need anything else at all. Go and look. I am not going to pretend a company that big is a bad option, and I am not going to tell you mine is the least expensive — it is not. iDrive costs less per terabyte at their larger plans.

The other number, which is the one that actually settled it for me. A real data recovery lab publishes its price list. A clicking drive — the mechanical failure, the one where they open it in a clean room and swap the heads — is $1,200 to $1,500. Simple recovery from a drive that still works is $100; firmware repair is $600 to $900; platter damage is $2,000.

Twelve hundred dollars is ten years of what I pay a month.

That is the whole calculation. I did not need a statistic and I do not need to frighten you. One bill from a recovery lab costs more than a decade of not needing one.

Sources for every number above: Apple iCloud+ pricing, apple.com/icloud | Microsoft 365 plan comparison, microsoft.com | Google One plans, one.google.com/about/plans | Dropbox plans, dropbox.com/plans | Backblaze Computer Backup, backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal | GotBackup Family plan, gotbackup.com | Data recovery price list, Rossmann Repair Group, rossmanngroup.com. All read on 14 August 2026. Prices change — go and check them yourself. That is rather the point.