Backup, disaster recovery, and a tested plan for getting back to work — because on the coast, "unlikely" arrives every few years.
Almost every business has backup software installed. Far fewer have watched a full restore complete. The gap between those two facts is where most data loss actually happens — not because nobody backed up, but because the backup had been silently failing for weeks and the first anyone knew was the day it was needed.
Backup is a process, not a product. It needs verifying, and the verification needs to be somebody's job.
We test restores on a schedule and tell you the result, including when it is not what anyone hoped.
How much data can you afford to lose?
Backing up nightly means a failure at 4pm costs you the day's work. Hourly costs more and loses less.
How long can you be down?
Restoring from off-site storage can take a day or more. Keeping a local copy costs more and gets you back faster.
Every continuity plan is a trade-off between those two and your budget. Anyone who does not ask them is selling you a product, not a plan.
A local copy for fast restores, an off-site copy for when the building itself is the problem. Neither alone is sufficient.
Scheduled test restores that prove the data comes back and the timing matches the plan. You get told the result either way.
Backups that cannot be encrypted or deleted by an attacker who reaches your network. Modern ransomware targets backups first, deliberately.
We are on the coast. Plans account for extended power loss, evacuation, and staff working from wherever they ended up — not just a failed hard drive.
Who to call, what comes back first, and in what order — written down and accessible when the network is the thing that is down.
For businesses that cannot afford a day offline, systems that can run temporarily from a standby copy while the primary is rebuilt.
It is better than nothing and it fails in three common ways: the drive is in the same building as the server, it is connected so ransomware can encrypt it too, and nobody has verified a restore. Fixing those is usually inexpensive.
That is exactly what the plan should state, and what the test restores confirm. If your current provider cannot answer it in hours or days, the plan has not been tested.
Not by itself. File sync services replicate changes — including deletions and encryption — to every copy. Sync is convenience; backup is a separate point-in-time copy you can go back to.
The assessment includes checking whether your current backups actually restore. It is a short exercise, and occasionally an alarming one.
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