backup-job-health

# Backup Job Health ## Overview "Backups are running" is the single most-assumed, least-verified fact in an MSP's environment. A backup job that failed silently three nights ago looks identical, from a distance, to one that's been succeeding for months — nobody notices until a restore is needed and there's nothing current to restore from. This skill is the recurring, portfolio-wide sweep that catches that gap before it becomes an incident: job success/ failure rate, missed-backup detection, and storage-consumption trending, rolled into one normalized view across every backup and BCDR tool an org has connected. This skill is about whether backups are *happening*. It is deliberately narrower than disaster-recovery readiness as a whole — it does not assess whether a backup, once taken, is actually recoverable (see `restore-test-verification`), and it does not assess whether the retention window or cadence in place actually satisfies a contracted requirement (see `retention-rpo-compliance`). Treat this as the first, most frequent layer of the DR assurance stack: if jobs aren't running, nothing downstream matters yet. ## Key Concepts ### Two fundamentally different job models Backup and BCDR vendors protect data in two structurally different ways, and treating them as the same "job" concept produces misleading comparisons: - **Image-based appliance backup** (e.g. Datto BCDR / SIRIS / Alto, Unitrends) — protects physical or virtual servers/workstations by taking periodic b...