Backups are a thing everyone agrees with and very few people have actually tested. The question that matters is not “do you have a backup” — it is “when did someone last restore from it, and how long did it take?”
Down here, it has a season
Hurricane season runs June to November, and it is the part of running a business in Manatee County that most IT advice written elsewhere quietly ignores. Power goes out. Humidity kills drives. An office can be closed for a week.
That changes what a backup has to be. A drive sitting next to the computer it backs up is not a backup — it is a second copy in the same flood. Offsite has to mean genuinely off this coast, and getting to your data has to be possible from wherever everyone ended up.
Monitored, not just scheduled
Most backup failures are not dramatic. A job stops running after an update. A disk fills. A new server gets added and nobody adds it to the schedule. The backup silently stops months before anyone needs it, and the first person to discover that is the person who needed it.
Monitoring means the failure is noticed when it happens, not when it matters. Alerts go somewhere a human reads, and the reporting says what actually ran rather than what was supposed to.
Restores that have been tried
A backup you have never restored from is a theory. Testing it is not complicated and it is the only way to find out that the job has been backing up an empty folder, or that the restore takes eleven hours when the business can survive two.
Knowing how long it takes to get working again is as important as having the copy at all, because that number is what you plan around.
Microsoft 365 needs backing up too
This one surprises people. Microsoft keeps your service running and holds deleted items for a limited period — it is not a backup of your business. A mailbox emptied by a compromised account, or a SharePoint library someone tidied up eight months ago, will not be sitting in a Microsoft archive waiting for you.
What this covers
- Backup for servers, workstations and Microsoft 365
- Offsite copies, so a local disaster is not a total one
- Monitoring with alerts that reach a person
- Restore testing, and knowing how long a real recovery takes
- Ransomware recovery planning — what gets restored, in what order
- Reviewing what you already have, and saying so if it is adequate
What it costs
It depends on how much data there is and how fast you need to be working again — those two numbers drive everything else. Both get established before a quote, not after.
Common questions
We copy files to an external drive. Is that enough?
It is better than nothing, and it is not enough on its own. It is in the same building, it is usually connected — which means ransomware can reach it — and nobody checks whether the copy completed.
How long would it take to get us running again?
That is exactly the right question, and it has a real answer once we have seen the setup. It is also the number most businesses have never been told.
Do you need to replace what we already have?
Not necessarily. If what is in place works and is monitored, you will be told that. Replacing a functioning backup to sell a different one is not a service.
What about ransomware — can backups actually save us?
They can, if the backups are isolated enough that the ransomware cannot encrypt them too, and if someone has thought about the order things come back in. Both are part of setting it up properly.
Tell us what you are protecting
Describe what your business runs on and where it lives now. You will get a plain answer on what is actually at risk and what it takes to cover it.
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BRATechSystems carries $1,000,000 general liability and $1,000,000 technology errors and omissions insurance through The Hartford. A certificate of insurance is available on request.
