When we start working with a new client, we ask one question early: "When did you last restore a file from your backup?" The most common answer is a pause. The second most common is "We have an external drive somewhere." Backups fail quietly — a full disk, an expired subscription, a password that changed — and nobody notices until the day they're needed.
The 3-2-1 rule, in plain language
The standard every business should meet:
- 3 copies of your important data — the original plus two backups.
- 2 different types of storage — for example, a local backup device and the cloud.
- 1 copy offsite — somewhere a fire, flood, theft, or ransomware attack on your office can't reach.
Modern backup tools add one more requirement: at least one copy should be immutable, meaning it can't be changed or deleted for a set period, even by an administrator. That's what stops ransomware from encrypting your backups along with everything else.
"But our files are already in the cloud"
Syncing is not backup. If a file in OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox gets deleted, overwritten, or encrypted by ransomware, that change syncs everywhere within seconds. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace keep deleted items for a limited time, but they're designed to keep the service running, not to restore your business to how it looked last Tuesday. A separate, dedicated backup of email and cloud files closes that gap.
How we test backups for our clients
- Daily: automated monitoring checks every backup job completed. A failed or skipped job creates a ticket, so it gets fixed the same day.
- Monthly: we restore a random selection of files and mailboxes and confirm they open correctly.
- Quarterly: for critical servers we do a full test recovery, booting the backup as a virtual machine to prove the whole system comes back and to measure how long it takes.
- Yearly: we walk through the disaster-recovery plan with the owner. Who gets called, what gets restored first, and how long the business can realistically run without each system.
A 15-minute check you can do today
- Write down every place your important data lives: computers, server, NAS, email, cloud drives, accounting software.
- For each one, find out what backs it up, where the copy is stored, and when the last successful backup ran.
- Pick one file from last week and try to restore it to a different folder. Time how long it takes.
- Ask yourself: if the office burned down tonight, which copy survives?
If any answer is "I don't know", you've found your biggest IT risk. It's also one of the cheapest to fix.
What good looks like
A properly managed backup runs automatically, is monitored by someone who gets alerted when it fails, keeps an offsite and immutable copy, and is restore-tested on a schedule. That's exactly what's included in our backup and business continuity services, and it's one of the first things we check in a free IT assessment.
Find out if your backup would actually save you.
As part of our free IT assessment, we review what's backed up, where it goes, and whether it can be restored. You'll know exactly where you stand.
Get a free IT assessmentWritten by Antonio Luis Martinez, founder of ALM IT Solutions in Iloilo City.