Having a backup and having a
recovery plan
are not the same thing.
your IT provider isn’t pushing one backup vendor. Here’s what actually determines whether you’re back up in an hour or out of business for a week.
Find your recovery model before you talk to a vendor
A few quick questions. We'll highlight the closest fit below, then you can read why.
Three recovery models, three different guarantees
Vendors bundle these differently and brand them however marketing wants that quarter. The underlying guarantee each one makes is what actually matters.
Local Backup
On-site copies with fast restore, but no protection if the whole site is compromised.
- Fastest restore for single-file recovery
- No protection from fire, theft, or site-wide ransomware
- Lowest ongoing cost
Cloud Backup
Offsite copies that survive a local disaster, with a slower restore than on-site.
- Survives fire, theft, and local disasters
- Restore speed depends on your internet connection
- Good baseline for most small businesses
Business Continuity / DR-as-a-Service
Near-instant failover that runs the business while the primary system recovers.
- Minutes of downtime, not hours or days
- Highest cost of the three options
- The only option that keeps you running during recovery
12 questions to ask any backup & disaster recovery vendor
Click each one off as you go. Bring what's left to the sales call, a vendor who gets defensive about any of these is telling you something.
What’s the actual Recovery Time Objective tested, not theoretical?
What’s the Recovery Point Objective how much data can you afford to lose?
Is a backup copy kept offline or immutable so ransomware can’t encrypt it too?
Has a full restore ever been tested not just a file-level spot check?
Who is notified if a backup job silently fails overnight?
What happens to backups if you stop paying tomorrow?
Does it cover SaaS data Microsoft 365 and cloud files, not just servers?
How long are backups retained and does that meet compliance needs?
What’s the real cost to restore versus just storing the data?
Can you run production from the backup or only recover individual files?
Is there a documented, rehearsed plan or just backup software running quietly?
Can you get a straight answer to all eleven questions above, in writing?
6 signs your backup & disaster recovery is a liability, not a defense
These show up constantly in businesses that thought they were covered.
Nobody has actually tried restoring from backup in the last year.
Backup failure alerts go to an inbox nobody checks.
The only copy of backups lives on the same network as production.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace aren’t backed up at all.
Retention is shorter than how long an attacker can sit undetected.
The "disaster recovery plan" is a single sentence in a folder.
The buzzwords, decoded
We’ll look at what you actually have, then tell you the truth about it.
No vendor commission riding on the answer. Just a straight read on whether you’d actually survive a bad day.
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