Backups that come back when you need them

The usual state of things

Ask a small Decatur office how it backs up and the answer is often a shrug. A counselor syncs notes to a personal cloud account. A nonprofit has an external drive that nobody has unplugged since 2019. A law office pays for a backup service whose warning emails still go to a paralegal who left. Each of these feels fine until the day a file is gone, and then the gaps show up all at once: the drive was full, the sync copied the deletion, the cloud account was never covered.

Risks that are real here

• Ransomware. It is the main reason small offices end up restoring everything. Modern attacks go looking for backup files and wipe them before encrypting the rest.
• Hardware that quits. Laptops get dropped, drives wear out and the old storage box in the closet eventually stops spinning.
• Everyday slips. Someone empties the wrong folder or saves an old template over this month's billing sheet.
• Weather. DeKalb County has been included in federal disaster or emergency declarations many times since 2000. The recent ones were an emergency declaration for Hurricane Helene in 2024 and one for the January 2026 winter storm (FEMA-3642-EM). Decatur's mature tree canopy is one of its charms, but a falling limb can still cut power or internet to a block of offices for a day or more.
• The building itself. Older and shared buildings bring their own hazards: a leak from the unit above, a fire next door, or a break-in that takes the computer and the drive that sat on top of it.

What we put in place

We start by listing what you would actually miss. For most offices that means Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace mail and files, the practice, case or accounting database, a few key computers and any server that is still running. Then we protect each item in a way that suits it.

• A nearby copy and a distant one. Quick restores come from a local copy. A second copy lives in a cloud data center far from Decatur in case the office is lost.
• Copies an intruder can't erase. The offsite copies are immutable, meaning they are locked for a set period and can't be changed, even with an admin password.
• A daily human check. Each business day someone on our team reads the backup results. A failed job is investigated and rerun the same day.
• Practice restores. On a schedule we bring back sample files and, at least yearly, an entire system. We time it and give you the result in writing.
• Encryption throughout. Every copy is encrypted in transit and at rest, which matters for client and patient records.

Keeping what the rules say you must keep

HIPAA asks covered practices to keep health information available as well as private, and to have a contingency plan for emergencies. Attorneys must safeguard client files. Nonprofits often need grant and donor records for audits long after a program ends. We set retention periods to match, log every restore and can show an auditor, funder or insurer exactly how the protection works.

Planning the bad day

Files are one part of recovery. The rest is people. We write a short plan with you that answers practical questions. Who makes the call to close the office? How does the main number reach someone's mobile? Can clinicians move scheduled sessions to telehealth from home? Which system has to come back first, and who tells clients? For hybrid teams much of this already works, because laptops and cloud tools don't depend on the building. We test that assumption with you once a year rather than finding out during a storm.

Offices that truly can't stop for long can keep a standby copy of a key server in the cloud, ready to start within hours. Most small practices and nonprofits don't need that, and we will say so.

Small power problems

Older wiring and brief flickers cause more trouble than people expect. We put battery units on the firewall, switches and any server, configure a clean shutdown for long outages and swap batteries on a schedule.

Questions about backups & recovery