We already have backups. What’s missing?
Usually three things: a restore anyone has actually performed, coverage of the systems people forget, and a copy that survives the bad day. A backup job that reports green for months can still fail on the one afternoon it matters, which is why ours get rehearsed on a written schedule with results you can see. And the job that only covers the file server misses the mailboxes, the cloud tenant, and the settings that take a week to rebuild from memory.
What should a small business actually back up?
More than the shared drive. Files, yes, but also mailboxes and the rest of your Microsoft 365 data, the line-of-business systems your day runs on, and the configurations underneath everything: who has access to what, how the network hangs together, what talks to what. When we build your inventory we walk the business first, because the point is not backing up disks. It is being able to hand you your Tuesday back.
How do you test that recovery works?
By doing it before it is needed, on a schedule, and writing down what happened. Restore rehearsals pull real data back and time it, so recovery estimates come from practice rather than hope. The results land in your reviews in plain English. If a rehearsal turns up a problem, good. That is the rehearsal doing its job on a calm day instead of the loud one.
What does the bad day actually look like with a plan?
Shorter, calmer, and documented. Something fails, or someone encrypts it. A severity path starts, a named lead owns it, and the restore follows the same steps it followed in rehearsal. You get told early what happened and what happens next, in sentences, not ticket numbers. A practiced recovery is also the strongest position a business can hold against ransomware: the demand loses most of its leverage when your data has a clean way home.
How fast can we be back up?
It depends on the system and the scenario, so we put recovery targets in writing per system instead of quoting one heroic number. A single restored mailbox and a rebuilt server after a fire are different days. What makes any target believable is rehearsal data: when the last practice restore of that system ran and how long it took. You will know your numbers because we measured them, and you will know which systems carry the tightest targets because we agreed on them together, in the plan, while everything was calm. The plan also names the order things come back, because on the loud day nobody should be ranking priorities from memory. Providers who promise one flat recovery time for every scenario are quoting hope.
Does our insurance care about our backups?
More every year. Cyber applications now ask pointed questions about backup coverage, isolation, and testing, and the answers get read closely on the day of a claim. We help you answer from evidence: what is covered, where copies live, when the last rehearsal ran, and how it went. Our guide on reading policies like an adjuster shows exactly how those questions get scored.
Quick answers
Do you back up Microsoft 365 too?
Yes. Mailboxes, shared files, and the parts of the tenant your day depends on, with what is covered, at what granularity, and for how long written into the plan per system. The platform keeps the service running; keeping your data recoverable is a separate job, and it is ours.