Backup & Recovery
If your computer died today, what would you lose?
We mean it literally. If the machine you’re reading this on stopped working in the next thirty seconds, what exactly would be gone?
Most people can’t answer, and that is the risk. You can’t protect what you’ve never named.
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’s always longer than people expect, and the length of that list is a fair measure of your exposure.
What a real backup looks like
A backup needs three properties, and missing any one of them leaves you exposed:
- Automatic. A backup that depends on someone remembering will be missing exactly 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 also encrypts attached drives.
- Tested. This is the one everybody skips.
Test the backup
Backups fail silently. They run for months reporting success while quietly skipping the one folder that mattered. Nobody finds this out on a calm Tuesday. They find out on the worst day of the year, which is the only day anyone tries to restore.
So try it now, while nothing is wrong. Restore one file, then a whole folder, and time it. How long it takes to get back to work is the backup number that matters.
Why backups are a security issue
Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that the human element is involved in 60% of breaches. People click things, and they always will. With enough emails, somebody eventually clicks.
So besides asking how do we avoid getting hit, ask what happens to us if we do. A tested backup turns a business-ending event into a bad afternoon.
Want to know where you actually stand? We do free, no-pressure security checks for small businesses across the East Bay, covering backups, accounts and defenses. We tell you plainly what to fix first.
Human-element figure: Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report.