Ask most business owners whether they have backups and the answer is yes. Ask when the last backup ran, whether it finished, and whether anyone has ever restored a file from it, and the answer gets a lot less certain.
How often you back up comes down to one question: how much work could your business lose without real damage? If the answer is “a day,” you need at least daily backups. If losing even an hour of orders, invoices or patient notes would hurt, you need something more frequent.
Start with what changes every day
Not all data needs the same schedule. Think about your information in three groups:
- Constantly changing: accounting files, shared documents, databases and line-of-business software. These usually need backups several times a day.
- Changing daily: email, project files and most user folders. A nightly backup is usually enough.
- Rarely changing: archived projects, old records and installed software. Weekly backups are fine.
Daily is the minimum for most offices
For a typical small office, at least one automatic backup per day is the baseline. Modern backup tools only copy what changed, so frequent backups do not slow down your computers or eat up your internet connection the way they used to.
Cloud apps need backups too
Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, OneDrive and Dropbox keep your files available, but they are not true backups. If someone deletes a folder, or ransomware encrypts files on a synced computer, those changes sync to the cloud as well. Retention settings help, but they have limits. A separate backup of your cloud email and files lets you go back to a clean copy.
Follow the 3-2-1 rule
A simple rule that holds up well: keep three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy offsite. That way a failed drive, a fire or a break-in cannot take out every copy at once. Ideally, at least one copy should be isolated so ransomware on your network cannot reach it.
A backup you have never restored is a guess
The most common backup problem we find is not a missing backup. It is a backup that has been failing quietly for months, or one that technically runs but cannot restore what you actually need. Backups should be monitored every day, and someone should test a real restore on a regular schedule.
Quick checklist
- Backups run automatically, without anyone remembering to start them
- Someone is alerted when a backup fails
- Email and cloud files are backed up separately
- At least one copy is stored offsite and protected from ransomware
- A test restore has been done in the last few months
If you cannot check every box, your business is taking more risk than it needs to. Our backup and disaster recovery service covers all of it, and a free IT checkup will tell you exactly where your backups stand today.
