One of the worst things we see in IT support is a business that believed it had good backups, right up until the moment they needed them.
Having a backup is not the same as having a working backup. Here are the most common ways businesses find that out at the worst possible time.
Backup software runs quietly in the background. If it hits a problem like a permissions error, a full drive, or a changed folder path, it often fails silently without any obvious notification. The dashboard might show green while nothing has actually been backed up for weeks.
The fix is simple: periodically check that backup jobs are completing, and actually try to restore a file. Not just confirm the job ran. Restore something real and make sure it works.
Backing up your computer to a folder on the same hard drive is not a real backup. If the drive fails, both copies are gone. Backing up to a drive sitting on the same desk at the same office still leaves you exposed to fire, theft, or a ransomware attack that encrypts everything on the network.
A solid backup strategy always has at least one copy that is physically or logically separate from the primary location.
Modern ransomware is designed to look for and destroy backup files before making itself visible. If your backup drive is always connected to your computer, or your cloud backup uses the same credentials as everything else, an attacker can get to both.
Protection here requires immutable backups (where files cannot be changed once written) or keeping at least one copy disconnected from the live network.
A lot of backup setups only cover certain folders: Documents, Desktop, Downloads. But critical business data often lives in unexpected places: accounting software databases, email archives, application data folders, and custom software configurations. Knowing exactly what your backup covers is worth checking. You might be surprised what is missing.
Even a perfect backup can let you down if restoring from it takes longer than your business can handle. Pulling hundreds of gigabytes from cloud backup over a slow connection can take days. For critical systems, a local backup that can be restored in hours is worth keeping alongside the cloud copy.
If you want an honest assessment of your current backup setup, we will tell you what is covered, what is not, and what a real recovery would actually look like. Our backup and recovery services are built around making sure it works before you need it. Get in touch to schedule an assessment.