Ask most small business owners whether their files are backed up, and the answer is yes. Ask where the backup is, when it last ran and whether anyone has ever restored from it, and the answer gets less certain.
A backup you haven’t checked is a hope, not a plan. As Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect, where I oversee managed IT for small and medium-sized businesses, these are the four questions I’d want every owner to be able to answer.
What gets backed up? Make a short list: accounting files, customer records, contracts, photos, email, and whatever lives on the computer at the front desk. Anything not on the list should be there on purpose, not by accident.
Where does the backup live? A copy on an external drive sitting next to the computer protects you from a dead hard drive. It does not protect you from a fire, a theft, or ransomware that encrypts every drive it can reach. Keep at least one copy somewhere else, such as a reputable cloud backup service.
When did it last run, and how would you know if it stopped? Backups fail quietly. A full disk, an expired password or a changed setting can stop them for months. Someone should get an alert when a backup fails, and someone should look at it.
Have you ever restored a file from it? This is the real test. Pick one file and restore it. If that takes a support call and an afternoon, you’ve learned something important on a quiet day instead of a bad one.
Backups aren’t exciting, and they shouldn’t be. The goal is simple: if something goes wrong tomorrow, you know exactly how you get your work back.
Danielle Lemons is Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect, a Nashville provider of business phone systems, managed IT services, websites and digital marketing. More about Danielle.
