What happens if it all burns down
Every business owner has the same quiet worry about anything that lives on a computer. What happens if it just goes? The server dies, the building floods, someone deletes the wrong thing, or one day a screen simply says the files are gone. For a lot of small operators the honest answer is a shrug and a hope, and the hope is usually a single copy sitting on the same machine as the thing it is meant to be saving.
A spare key in the same lock
Why one copy is not a backup.
One copy on the same machine is not really a backup. If the machine goes, the copy goes with it. It is a spare key left in the same lock as the door.
Layers, on purpose
Close, nightly, and far away.
Here is how we actually do it, because it is the sort of dull groundwork that only ever matters on the worst day of your year.
There are layers, on purpose. A hot copy, kept close and current, for the small everyday messes where you just need yesterday back in a hurry. A nightly copy, a full snapshot taken while you sleep and kept for a rolling stretch of days, so you can wind the clock back to a good moment even if the problem took a while to spot. And a copy held offsite, somewhere completely separate from the servers, so a fire, a theft or a supplier going dark cannot take the original and the safety net in one go. Three separate things have to fail at once before you are in real trouble, and they do not share a weak point.
A backup you never restored is a guess
The bit most people skip.
The bit most people skip is the important one. A backup you have never actually restored is just a hope with a filename on it. The only way to know it works is to do it, on a normal day, when nothing is on fire. So we do restore drills: take the backup, rebuild from it, and check the rebuilt thing genuinely works, not just that the files copied across. A backup that will not restore cleanly is worse than none, because it lets you relax when you should be worried sick.
What you are actually paying for
A bad afternoon, not the end of the business.
If a health and safety background teaches you anything, it is that you plan for the bad day before it turns up, and you practise the drill so that when the alarm goes, nobody is reading the manual for the first time. Same idea here.
That is what you are actually paying for when someone looks after your systems properly. Not that nothing ever goes wrong, because it will. That when it does, it is a bad afternoon and not the end of the business.
We build this kind of thing for a living
Websites, online systems and the boring groundwork underneath, built so the bad day is a bad afternoon and not the end of the business.
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