A 30-minute backup restore drill for your home setup
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup. And if you are the one who set it all up, your partner has even less chance of restoring it than you do. Pick what you back up, and this page builds a short restore drill: what to restore, to where, how to know it worked, and a log you can print and keep with your household notes. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Tick what you back up and press "Build my drill".
Why a drill, not just a backup job
Most backup failures are found at the worst moment: the job ran every night but wrote to a disk that was full, the key was lost with the machine, or the restore takes a day nobody planned for. A short, regular restore test finds these while they are cheap. The widely used 3-2-1 rule (three copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them off-site) tells you how many copies to keep; it says nothing about whether you can get one back, which is the part this drill checks.
What to do with the result
- Write the one-line restore steps for each item on the page your partner would open first. Our free start-here sheet has a line for where the backups are.
- If a restore needs a login you keep only in your head or on one phone, fix that first. The guide to what to write down explains where recovery codes belong.
- Running self-hosted services? The home server shutdown planner covers what to keep, export or shut down.
- Not sure where else you are exposed? Try the free gap checker. The Handover Binder ($9) has a backup register and a per-backup restore block ready to fill in.
This page is general planning information. It is not professional IT, legal or financial advice, and not a will.