Ransomware, a failed drive, a deleted folder, a flooded office - the causes differ, but they end the same way: your data is gone. Whether that is a bad afternoon or the end of the business comes down to one thing you set up in advance. Backup and disaster recovery is the least glamorous IT topic and one of the most important.
Backup vs. disaster recovery
They are related but not the same. A backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the plan for getting your business operating again after something goes wrong - which data, how fast, in what order, using what. You need both: copies to restore from, and a plan for using them under pressure.
The 3-2-1 rule
A simple, durable standard: keep three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one kept off-site. It protects you whether the threat is hardware failure, a mistake, or an attack that reaches everything connected.
Why untested backups fail
The cruelest discovery is a backup that does not restore - corrupted, incomplete, or missing the thing you needed. An untested backup is a guess, not a safety net. The only way to know it works is to actually restore from it, on a schedule, before you are relying on it in an emergency.
Building a recovery plan
Two questions shape a plan. How much data can you afford to lose - an hour, a day (your recovery point)? And how fast must you be back - minutes, hours, a day (your recovery time)? Answer those for your critical systems and the plan follows: what to back up how often, and how to restore in what order. This is core to resilient infrastructure.
Tell us what you cannot afford to lose and we will scope backup and recovery around it.