Local, off-site, and actually tested
A backup you have never restored is a rumour.
Nearly every business we assess has a backup. A striking number of them have a backup that has been silently failing for months, or one that ransomware would encrypt along with everything else. The difference only shows up on the worst day of your year.
What it costs
Backup monitoring and quarterly test restores are included at the $149 seat price under a managed agreement. Standalone setup and off-site storage are quoted on data volume.
The three ways backups fail
It stopped running. Months ago. The drive filled, a credential expired, or an update broke the agent, and the failure email went to somebody who left. Nobody checked because it had always just worked.
It was on the network. Ransomware in 2026 hunts for backups before it encrypts anything, precisely because that is what makes people pay. A backup drive plugged into the server, or a share the server can write to, is encrypted alongside everything else.
It was never restored. The job reported success every night for two years. The first attempted restore reveals it was backing up the wrong volume, or that nobody knows the encryption key. Success in a log is not the same as data you can get back.
What we actually configure
A local copy for speed — restoring a deleted folder should take minutes, not a download. An off-site copy for the fire, flood or theft case. And immutability on the off-site copy, so that even fully compromised credentials cannot delete or encrypt the backup history.
That is the modern version of the old 3-2-1 rule, and the immutable part is the piece that matters most now. It is also the piece that is missing from most of the setups we inherit.
Testing is the whole point
We test-restore quarterly and write down what happened, including how long it took. That number is the one that matters when you are trying to decide whether to keep waiting or start calling customers.
The test also catches the boring failures — a database that backs up while running and restores corrupt, a share whose permissions do not survive, an encryption key nobody documented.
How long can you afford to be down?
Two questions decide everything about the design. How much data can you afford to lose — a day, an hour, none? And how long can the business be stopped — a week, a day, two hours?
Tighter answers cost more, and there is a genuine trade. A business that can work off paper for two days needs something very different from one where a stopped system means idle staff and missed shipments. We would rather have that conversation with you than sell you the most expensive option by default.
Ransomware, specifically
If it happens, backups decide whether it is an expensive week or an extinction event. The businesses that recover well have an off-site immutable copy, know their restore time because they have measured it, and have somewhere clean to restore onto.
The ones that pay are the ones whose backup was reachable from the machine that got encrypted. Nothing else about their security posture matters as much as that one detail.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
How often should backups run?
For most businesses, image-level backups hourly during the working day and a nightly off-site copy. If you can genuinely tolerate losing a day's work, nightly alone is cheaper and we will tell you so.
Is a backup drive plugged into the server good enough?
No, and it is actively risky. Ransomware encrypts attached and network-reachable drives deliberately. You need a copy the compromised machine cannot write to — that is the entire point of immutable off-site storage.
Does OneDrive or Google Drive count as a backup?
It is sync, not backup. If a file is encrypted, corrupted or deleted, the sync faithfully propagates that. Version history helps for a single file and falls apart across thousands. Treat it as convenience and back it up separately.
How do we know the backup actually works?
Because someone restored from it recently. We test-restore quarterly and give you the result including the elapsed time. Any provider who cannot tell you when your last successful test restore was is guessing.
What does business backup cost?
It is included in managed agreements at the $149 seat price for monitoring and verification, with off-site storage billed on data volume. Standalone setup for a small business is usually a few hundred dollars plus monthly storage — we quote after seeing how much data you actually have, which is nearly always more than people estimate.
Can you recover data after a ransomware attack?
If there is a clean off-site copy, usually yes. Without one, options narrow to whatever a decryptor exists for, and that is a poor position to be in. This is a problem solved before it happens, not after.
Ready when you are.
Ring us and describe the problem in plain English. We will tell you what it costs before anyone drives anywhere.