Is Your Business Actually Backed Up? Most SMBs in Ontario Aren't.
Think your data is safe because you have a backup? Most small businesses in Ontario discover the hard way that backups and working backups are two very different things.
Every week, we get a call that starts the same way.
"We had a backup. We just didn't know it wasn't working."
It happens more than you'd think — a server goes down, ransomware hits, or an employee accidentally deletes a critical folder, and the business owner points to their backup solution with confidence. Then we look at it together, and the last successful backup was four months ago. Or the backup was running, but nobody ever tested a restore. Or the files are there but the database is corrupt.
A backup that hasn't been tested isn't a backup. It's a false sense of security.
What a real backup strategy looks like
The industry standard is called the 3-2-1 rule:
- 3 copies of your data
- 2 different storage types (local + cloud, for example)
- 1 copy stored offsite or air-gapped
For most small businesses in KW-Cambridge, this means a local appliance that takes snapshots every hour combined with cloud replication. Solutions like Datto, Veeam, or Azure Backup can handle this — but the technology is only half the equation. The other half is actually checking it.
What you should be doing monthly
At minimum, someone on your team (or your IT provider) should be verifying:
- Did the backup complete successfully last night?
- When was the last time we restored a file from backup and confirmed it worked?
- Are our Microsoft 365 emails and SharePoint files included? (Hint: Microsoft does not back these up for you by default.)
That last point surprises a lot of people. Microsoft 365 is not a backup solution. It has some versioning and a recycle bin, but if an employee's account gets compromised and an attacker deletes your mailboxes, you may have a very short window to recover — or none at all.
The cost of getting this wrong
The average cost of downtime for a small business is measured in thousands of dollars per hour. A ransomware attack that encrypts your files and takes your systems offline for three days doesn't just cost you the ransom — it costs you lost productivity, emergency IT recovery, potential data breach notifications, and in some cases, clients who don't come back.
The businesses that recover fast are the ones that practiced recovering fast before the disaster happened.
Not sure where you stand?
If you're a business you're not 100% confident in your backup strategy, we're happy to take a look. A backup audit takes less than an hour and could save you everything.