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It's time for your checkup. We promise it won't hurt.
First: Checkup Check up on your strategy. What are you trying to achieve with your backup? Are you trying to backup all the data in your experiments, or just some, or just your important findings? Do your backups need to be able to survive a major earthquake that impacted the site? Are you using the best form of technology to ensure that your data remains safe? For example, if you're still using external hard drives as backup, make sure you've evaluated some of the newer alternatives that may provide more resilient backups. Remember that file sync (like Dropbox and Google Drive Sync) are not the same thing as Backups (see more on this below).
Second: Checkup Check up on your scope. Are you actually backing up the data you want to backup? Have your experimental results moved somewhere else and you're no longer backing them up? Make sure your backup software or process is correctly backing up the files and directories and systems you need.
Third: Checkup Check up on your data. Now it's time to go do a quick spot check on your backups. Does your backup client report that it's working? Can you see recent files in your backups or in the logs provided by the backup client? Does the size of your backup correspond to the amount of data you think you've backed up?
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