The Backup You Think You Have
William “BJ” Pote
CEO, eTop Technology
Backup is the only part of your technology that is designed to be invisible until the worst day of your year. Which means it is also the only part that can be quietly broken for months without anyone noticing.
Most business owners we meet believe they have backup. Most of them are right. Fewer can answer the three questions that determine whether it will actually help.
The failure is silent by design
Backup does not fail loudly. It fails as a job that did not complete, logged somewhere nobody reads, in a system that keeps reporting success for everything else.
We monitor backups for a general contractor we support, and when their cloud backup started failing it came to us as a Priority 1 alert. That is the point of monitoring: a failed backup should be an emergency on the day it fails, not a discovery you make during a restore.
The uncomfortable version of this is the company where nobody is watching. The backup stopped in March. Nobody finds out until the ransomware, or the drive failure, or the bookkeeper deleting the wrong folder in September. Six months of nothing, and the first person to learn about it is the owner, on the worst possible day.
Three questions worth asking this week
You do not need to understand the technology to audit this. Ask your IT provider, or whoever handles it, these three. The quality of the answers tells you most of what you need to know.
1. What is actually being backed up?
Not “the server.” Specifically what. In a typical office the list should include the accounting file, your project or job files, email, and anything living on individual workstations that is not stored centrally.
That last category is where companies get hurt. Estimates on the estimator’s laptop. Job photos on one desktop. Files somebody keeps locally because the network folder is slow. If those are not in the backup, they are not backed up, no matter what the invoice says.
Microsoft 365 deserves specific mention. A lot of owners assume email and files in Microsoft 365 are backed up by Microsoft. Microsoft keeps the service running. Retaining your data against deletion, a compromised account, or a departing employee is a separate product that you either bought or did not.
2. When did someone last restore something from it?
This is the question that separates real backup from theoretical backup. A backup that has never been restored is an assumption.
The test does not have to be dramatic. Pick a file from a month ago and ask for it back. Time how long it takes. That number is your actual recovery time, and it is frequently very different from the one in the proposal.
3. How long could we operate without it?
If the server died this morning, what would your team do today? Could you still see tomorrow’s schedule, get to your files, run payroll on Friday?
The answer determines what you should be paying for. A company that can work from phones and cloud files for two days needs something different from one where everything stops when the office server stops. Both are legitimate. Guessing is not.
What good looks like
More than one copy, and one of them somewhere else. A backup that lives in the same building as the original is a fire and theft plan with a gap in it.
Someone watching it daily, not monthly. Failures need to surface as alerts to a person whose job is to act on them. If the only monitoring is a report nobody opens, you have logging, not monitoring.
Restores tested on a schedule. Quarterly is reasonable. It should be somebody’s task with a date on it.
Microsoft 365 covered deliberately. Either you have a backup product for it or you have accepted the risk. Both are decisions. Only one of them is usually made on purpose.
Written down. What is covered, how long it is kept, how fast it comes back. One page. So the answer does not live only in the head of whoever set it up.
The uncomfortable exercise
Ask for a restore this week. Not a report, an actual file, actually recovered, actually opened.
If it comes back in an hour, you can stop thinking about this. If the request produces hesitation, you have learned something important while it is still an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
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William “BJ” Pote
CEO, eTop Technology
eTop Technology has spent over 15 years in IT and over 12 years serving the Inland Empire as a trusted managed IT provider. We host the Business Tech Playbook podcast and are passionate about helping business leaders make smarter technology decisions.