I meet lots of people who don’t believe in paying for backup services. The memory stick or USB drive they bought 3 (or more) years ago from BestBuy is good enough… Right?

First ask, “Could I run my business without any data?” In Business Continuity, we ask two questions:

1. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How long could my business survive without its data? Hours? Days? Months?
2. Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How recent does my backed up data need to be for it to be useful? Yesterday? Last Friday? Last month?

There are at least 3 problems with the “BestBuy” solution

1. Portable storage solutions fail. Drives get corrupted. Drive heads lose alignment. Magnetic fields can erase the drive data. Unless you’re restoring back from the backup every month you just don’t know if you have a good backup! I know a local business person who diligently made a backup every Friday afternoon. Four years later, her server crashed and she needed to recover the data only to find that the backup drive wouldn’t boot. She hired her teenage daughter to spend the entire summer copying all her paper records back into the new server. (Apparently they still do talk to each other).
2. If you overwrite your backup, say every Friday with a new backup, you might find the the recovery point you need is from 2 backups ago. How many drives will you keep in circulation? I know a business that didn’t realize until at least 4 months later that someone had deleted all its pricing sheets. It did not keep that many backup copies.
3. It can take days to recover data from a backup, especially if there is no spare computer to restore to. This has to be part of your RTO planning.

You have options!

If you’re using M365 or Google Workspace, Atlas Solutions can make backups 3 times a day (every 8 hours), and we can recover your Digital Workspace data from any past backup.

• A rogue employee deleted all your files (and their emails) before walking out the door? No problem.
• Someone accidentally overwrote a file and didn’t notice it until the client asked for a fresh copy of that proposal 3 months later? No problem.

But we can also backup your actual physical computer with all its programs, configurations, files, passwords and icons.

• We can do this on-premise. A backup appliance at your worksite can make a backup of your server or other computers up to every 15 minutes. We can recover files within an hour. If your computer suffers a catastrophic failure, we can actually turn the appliance into a replacement computer until new hardware arrives. The appliance also copies its data to a Canadian cloud server because…
• We can do this in the cloud. If your office burns down, or there’s police tape around your door tomorrow morning, we can “spin up” a copy of your computer in the cloud within about an hour and get you back to work until your office is safe to work in again.
• If your computer is attacked with malware, we can recover your computer to a backup just before the malware attack. This is an economical and fast way to get you back to work without the need to pay ransomware.
• We can replace or upgrade your computer just the way you remember the old one. This is called a “bare metal restore” and by ponying the appliance to the new computer, you’ll end up with a new, better, faster, computer but with all the software and desktop icons of the old one.

The size of backup appliance is scaled to match your business’ needs, from one computer to a floor of workstations.

So the question really is again, “How important is your business’ data? Can you afford to trust it to an inexpensive USB drive?

If you’re not convinced and you want to keep using your USB drive, here’s a video to watch when you will eventually need to recover the data from a failed drive: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4Q6pwU5GWa8

The interior of drive cases need to be dust free so after (hopefully) recovering your data, be sure to replace the drive with a new unit.