Backup & Recovery
If your computer died today, what would you lose?
Not rhetorically. Literally. If the machine you’re reading this on stopped working in the next thirty seconds — what, specifically, would be gone?
Most people can’t answer. That inability is the risk. You cannot protect what you have never taken the trouble to name.
Make the list. It takes ten minutes.
Client files. Invoices and accounts. Photos of finished work. Tax records. The contract nobody printed. Passwords in a browser nobody exported. The quote you were halfway through.
Write it down. It is always longer than people expect, and the length of that list is the true measure of your exposure.
What a real backup looks like
Three properties. Miss any one and it isn’t a backup:
- Automatic. A backup that depends on someone remembering is a backup that will be missing precisely when it matters, because the week you forget will be a bad week for other reasons too.
- Off-site. A backup drive sitting next to the computer shares its fate in a fire, a flood, or a theft. Ransomware, notably, encrypts attached drives too.
- Tested. This is the one everybody skips.
An untested backup is not a backup
It is a hope, wearing a backup’s clothing.
Backups fail silently. They run for months, reporting success, quietly excluding the one folder that mattered. Nobody discovers this on a calm Tuesday. They discover it on the worst day of the year, which is the only day anyone ever tries to restore.
So try it now, while nothing is wrong. Restore one file. Then restore a whole folder. Time it. That number — how long it takes to get back to work — is the only backup metric that means anything.
Why this is the security story, not just an IT story
Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that the human element is involved in 60% of breaches. People click things. They always will. That’s not a character flaw; it’s arithmetic.
Which means the question isn’t only how do we never get hit — it’s what happens to us if we do. A tested backup is the difference between a catastrophe and a bad afternoon. It is the single control that turns a business-ending event into an inconvenience.
Want to know where you actually stand? We do free, no-pressure security checks for small businesses across the East Bay — backups, accounts, defenses. We tell you plainly what to fix first.
Human-element figure: Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report.