Two numbers decide everything
How much data can you afford to lose, and how long can you afford to be down? Answer those two honestly and the right backup design follows. Skip them and you end up paying for either too much protection or, far more often, nowhere near enough.
We work those numbers through with you department by department - the finance system and the shared drive rarely deserve the same answer - then build backup and recovery around them. Christchurch taught this part of the country what a bad week looks like; the plan is worth having before you need it.
What gets protected
- Servers - full image-level backup so a failed server can be brought back as a machine, not reassembled from files
- Workstations and laptops - for the documents that never quite made it to the shared drive
- Microsoft 365 - Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, which Microsoft does not back up on your behalf
- Line-of-business databases - backed up in a way the vendor will actually support restoring
- Configuration - firewall, switch and system configs, so rebuilding does not mean rediscovering
How it is designed
- 3-2-1 as a minimum - three copies, two types of media, one off site
- Immutable off-site copies that ransomware on your network cannot reach, encrypt or delete
- Data held in New Zealand where that matters to you or your clients
- Monitored daily, with failures raised as tickets rather than sitting in an inbox nobody reads
- Restores tested on a schedule, and the results reported to you
When something does go wrong
Contain
Isolate affected systems so the problem stops spreading while we work out what happened.
Assess
Identify what is affected, what is clean, and which restore point is safe to return to.
Restore in priority order
The systems the business cannot trade without come back first - agreed with you in advance, not debated on the day.
Review
A written account of what happened, what it cost, and what changes stop it happening twice.
When was your last test restore?
If the answer is "not sure", that is the finding. We will run a restore test against your current backups and show you the result.
Pairs well with
Common questions
We sync everything to OneDrive. Is that a backup?
No. Sync copies changes, including bad ones - if a file is encrypted or deleted, that change syncs too. Versioning and the recycle bin help within a limited window, but they are not a substitute for a separate backup you control.
How long is data kept?
Set by your retention policy, and often by your industry's record-keeping obligations. A common pattern is daily restore points for a month, then monthly points for a year or more. We size the solution to the retention you actually need.
Is our data stored in New Zealand?
It can be, and for many customers it should be. Where you have client, health or public sector obligations we will design for New Zealand data residency and document where every copy lives.
How quickly could we be back up after a total server failure?
That is the recovery time objective we agree at design stage. Depending on what you are prepared to invest, options range from restoring to replacement hardware over a day or two, through to spinning the server up in cloud within hours.
Would your backups actually get you back?
We will review what you have today, run a test restore, and tell you plainly whether it would hold up. Better to find out now.