To ensure daily backups will work if needed, what should a systems administrator do?

Setting up alerts to notify administrators when backups fail is an essential practice to ensure that daily backups will work when needed. This approach allows for immediate awareness and response to backup issues, facilitating timely troubleshooting and resolution of any problems that could prevent a successful backup. By receiving alerts, administrators can take corrective action quickly, thus maintaining the integrity and reliability of data protection strategies.

In contrast, other options, while they may be useful in specific scenarios, do not directly ensure that backups will work when needed. Regularly restoring servers from backup files tests the integrity of the backups but can be resource-intensive and may not be practical for daily verification. Configuring backups to restore to virtual machines can enhance recovery speed but does not inherently address the fundamental need to ensure that backups are being completed successfully. Setting up scripts to rerun failed backup jobs can help with automation, but without alerting mechanisms, administrators may remain unaware of these failures until an actual recovery operation is required, increasing the risk of data loss or extended downtime.