Backup & Disaster Recovery
Backup chosen, set up, and managed by us — owned and paid for by you. Local, cloud, or both, sized to what you can actually afford to lose.
- Local backup to removable drives, tape, or whatever fits the budget and the building
- Cloud backup for the case where the building is gone
- File-level or full bare-metal recovery, depending on how fast you need to be running again
- Hardware and subscriptions billed to you directly, not folded into the monthly rate
- Restore testing available when you want it
- Microsoft 365 backup set up on request — Microsoft does not do it for you
An untested backup is a rumor
The question is never “do you have backups.” It is “when did someone last restore from them, and how long did it take.”
We will run that test for you when you ask. We do not run it automatically, and we are telling you that plainly — because you should not assume any provider tests your restores unless it is written down somewhere you can point at. Ask us and we will schedule it and give you the result in writing. Ask your current provider the same question and see what you get.
Two questions decide what you buy
Everything else about backup follows from these:
- How much data can you afford to lose? An hour of invoices is a bad afternoon. A week of them is a lawsuit. Your answer sets how often the backup runs.
- How long can you afford to be down? If you can work off paper for two days, copying files back is fine. If a stopped server stops payroll, you need something that brings the whole machine back, not just its documents.
We will tell you what each answer costs before you commit to it. You decide which one you are actually buying — we are not going to sell a small office the recovery plan a hospital needs.
What we set up
Local backup. Removable hard drives, tape, a NAS — whatever suits the site and the budget, including hardware you already own. Fast to restore from, because the data never left the building.
Cloud backup, usually CrashPlan, for the fire, the flood, and the theft. The local copy handles the everyday mistake; the offsite copy handles the day the building is not there anymore.
File backup or bare metal. Simple software that protects documents, or heavier software that captures the entire machine so a dead server can be rebuilt onto new hardware. Which one you need comes straight out of the two questions above.
Who pays for what
The drives, the tapes, the NAS, and the backup subscription are yours. You buy them, you own them, and they stay yours if you ever leave us.
What your monthly rate covers is our part: helping you pick hardware and software that actually fit, setting it up, and keeping an eye on it afterward. We would rather help you buy the right thing once than resell you ours at a markup.
Microsoft 365
Microsoft replicates your data across its own infrastructure. That is not a backup. It will not save you from a file deleted three months ago, from ransomware that encrypted a synced OneDrive folder, or from a departing employee who cleaned out a mailbox on the way out.
We do not back up Microsoft 365 by default today. If you want it — and if your business runs on email and SharePoint, you probably should — we will set it up as an add-on and manage it alongside everything else.
Need help with backup & disaster recovery?
Tell us what you are dealing with. We will tell you plainly whether we can help, what it takes, and what it costs.