Backup & disaster recovery
A backup only counts if it restores.
Most businesses have a backup of some kind. Fewer know what it covers, how old the newest copy is, or how long it would take to get back to work. This page explains how to answer those three questions.
Sample data · “Your Business”, Oxford, AL
Quick answer
What is the difference between backup and disaster recovery?
A backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the plan for getting the whole business working again after a fire, a ransomware attack or a dead server: which systems come back first, where they run, who does what and how long it takes. You need both, because a copy of your files is not much use with nothing to restore it onto.
The 3-2-1 rule
Three copies, two places, one off site.
The 3-2-1 rule is the long-standing baseline for backups. It is simple enough to check in five minutes.
3 copies of your data
The live copy you work from, plus two backups. One backup alone can fail on the day you need it.
2 different kinds of storage
For example a backup device in the office and a cloud backup service. A power surge or a failed drive should not be able to take out both.
1 copy off site
A fire, flood, theft or tornado that reaches the office should not reach every copy. Off site also means out of reach of ransomware on the office network.
A copy that ransomware can reach and encrypt is not a backup. At least one copy should be offline or locked against changes.
Two numbers to decide
How much can you lose, and how long can you be down?
Recovery point: how much work you can lose
If the backup runs once a night and the server dies at 4pm, everything since last night is gone. If losing a day of work is not acceptable, the backup has to run more often.
Recovery time: how long you can be down
The time from “it’s gone” to “we’re working again.” Downloading everything from the cloud onto new hardware can take days. If you need to be back in hours, the plan has to be built for that.
These are business decisions, not technical ones. Decide them per system: the accounting system and the shared drive may need different answers than an old archive.
Microsoft 365
Your email and files in the cloud still need their own backup.
Microsoft keeps the service running. The data in it is your responsibility. Microsoft 365 has a recycle bin and version history, but deleted items are only kept for a limited time, and those features were built for convenience, not as a backup.
They do not protect you well when a departed employee’s mailbox is removed with the license, when someone deletes a folder and nobody notices for months, when a synced computer overwrites good files with bad ones, or when an attacker gets into an account and empties it.
A separate backup of mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint, held outside your Microsoft 365 account, closes that gap.
Why backups fail
The backup that was never tested.
A backup report that says “success” tells you a job ran. Only a restore proves the data comes back.
How backups quietly break
- The job has been failing for months and the warning emails go to someone who left
- The backup drive filled up
- A new folder or database was never added to the job
- The backup is fine but nobody knows the encryption password
- Only files are backed up, not the server they run on
What a restore test is
- Pick real data: a folder, a mailbox, a whole server
- Restore it to a separate location, not over the live copy
- Open it and confirm it works
- Write down how long it took
- Fix whatever went wrong, then test again on a schedule
A checklist for today
Seven questions any owner can ask.
- What exactly is backed up? Ask for the list, and look for what is missing.
- When did the last backup finish successfully?
- Where is the off-site copy, and who can sign in to it?
- When was the last test restore, and what was restored?
- Is Microsoft 365 email and OneDrive backed up separately?
- If the server died this afternoon, what would we do first, and how long until we are working?
- Is the plan written down somewhere that is not on the server?
If nobody can answer three or more of these, that is your finding.
What it costs
Monitoring is included. New equipment is quoted.
Backup monitoring and management is part of the plan: we watch the backup jobs, act on failures and run restore tests. Minimum 5 users. Microsoft 365 licenses billed separately at Microsoft’s price.
- Backup monitoring and management
- 24/7 monitoring and alerting
- Patch management
- Advanced security monitoring
- Monthly reporting
- After-hours emergency support
Priced in a written proposal before any work starts.
- New backup hardware or software licenses
- Cloud backup for servers and Microsoft 365
- A written disaster recovery plan
- A full recovery test of a key system
Backup storage and software licenses are a cost of their own, sized to how much data you have. The quote shows them as separate lines.
Questions
Backup questions, plainly answered.
How often should a business back up its data?
Often enough that you can live with losing everything since the last backup. For many small offices that means at least nightly for servers and shared files, and more often for systems that change all day, such as accounting or order entry.
Isn’t OneDrive or Dropbox a backup?
It is a sync tool. It copies changes everywhere, including deletions and files encrypted by ransomware. Version history helps for a while, but a real backup is a separate copy that keeps older versions on its own schedule.
What is a restore test?
Restoring real data from the backup to a separate place and checking that it opens and works. It is the only way to know the backup is usable, and it tells you how long a real recovery would take.
How long does it take to recover from ransomware?
It depends on how much data there is, where the clean backup is and whether there is hardware to restore onto. A business with a tested plan knows its number in advance. A business without one finds out during the incident.
Do you back up Microsoft 365?
We set up and manage a separate backup for Microsoft 365 mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint. Monitoring it is part of Managed IT; the backup service license itself is quoted.
We already have a backup. Can you just check it?
Yes. An IT assessment includes a look at what is backed up, where the copies are and whether a restore works. The assessment is quoted up front and the findings are written in plain English.
Is backup included in Managed IT?
Backup monitoring and management is included at $175 per user, per month, with a 5-user minimum. New backup hardware, backup licenses and disaster recovery planning projects are quoted separately.
Contact
Request an IT assessment.
A hands-on review of your computers, network, security and backups, quoted up front, with findings in plain English.