Service 03
Backup & recovery
A backup plan you could explain to someone else, and a restore you have actually seen work. We do not promise recovery times we cannot control — we test what can be tested.
Support, in practice
An untested backup is a hope, not a plan.
We check what is being captured, where it lands, how long it is kept — and then we restore something, on purpose, to prove it works.
The method
Classify, schedule, then rehearse.
Not all data deserves the same treatment. Losing a year of invoices and losing a cache of downloaded installers are different problems, so we start by sorting your data into tiers: what would stop the business, what would hurt, and what can be recreated.
Each tier gets a schedule and a destination — local, cloud, or both — and a retention period you can justify. Then comes the part most providers skip: a rehearsal. We restore a real folder to a spare location and check that the files open.
- Data tiers with retention periods
- Local and off-site copies where appropriate
- Encryption and access control on the backup store
- A written restore procedure, not a verbal one
- A rehearsal record with dates and what was restored
Process
Three stages.
Map the data
Where it lives, how it is produced, what depends on it, and what would happen if it vanished.
Build the schedule
Tiers, destinations, retention and the person responsible for checking that jobs actually ran.
Rehearse a restore
A real folder, restored and opened, with the result recorded. Repeated at an agreed interval.
Boundaries
What we promise, and what we do not.
- No guaranteed recovery time — restore speed depends on volume, bandwidth and the destination
- No guaranteed recovery from physical drive failure; that needs a specialist data-recovery lab
- We do not hold your data on our own systems; backups live in accounts you control
- We configure and test; the backup account, billing and encryption keys stay yours
- Where a vendor’s retention or versioning limits apply, we state them rather than assume
A written plan with honest limits is worth more than a promise nobody can keep — especially on the day you need it.
When did you last restore something?
If the answer is “never”, that is the job to start with.