Data Backup vs Disaster Recovery: What We Teach Almost Every New Client
A backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the ability to keep operating while that data is being restored. Most businesses have the first and assume it gives them the second.
It does not, and the gap between them is usually discovered on the worst possible morning.
The Way We Explain It
Imagine every part needed to build your car, boxed and stacked neatly on a shelf. Nothing is missing. Everything is labelled.
That is a backup.
Now imagine a second car in the driveway, built, fuelled and ready to drive.
That is disaster recovery.
Both protect you from losing the car. Only one gets you to work on Monday.
When a business tells us they are covered because they have backups, this is the conversation we have. They usually do have every part on the shelf. What they have never asked is how long assembly takes, and who is doing it while the business is stopped.
The Two Questions That Matter
Strip away the terminology and backup planning comes down to two numbers.
How much data can you afford to lose? If your backup runs nightly at 11pm and the server fails at 4pm, you have lost a day's work. For some businesses that is survivable. For a firm that books client work all day, it is a serious problem. This is your recovery point.
How long can you afford to be stopped? Restoring a server from backup is not quick. Depending on the volume and where the backup lives, it can be hours or days, and that is after someone has sourced replacement hardware. This is your recovery time.
Every decision about backup and recovery is really a decision about those two numbers and what you are prepared to pay to shrink them.
Most businesses have never been asked either question. That is the actual gap, more than any technology.
Why Backups Fail
When a backup does not work, the cause is almost never dramatic.
Folders were excluded when the job was first configured, and nobody revisited it when the business changed. The destination filled up. A password changed and the job started failing silently. The backup sits on the same network ransomware would encrypt. Failure notifications go to a mailbox nobody reads.
The common thread is that a backup is set up once and then trusted indefinitely. A backup nobody has restored from is a plan, not a protection.
What Recovery Actually Looks Like
Two situations from our own clients, anonymised.
A professional services firm lost a server during business hours. Because recovery had been planned rather than just backed up, staff were working again the same day on a standby system while the original was rebuilt underneath them. The business did not stop.
A second client was hit with ransomware that reached their production network. Their backups were held separately, in a form the attack could not touch, so the recovery was a restore rather than a negotiation. The incident cost them time. It did not cost them the business.
In both cases the difference was not better backup software. It was that somebody had thought about operating during the restore, not just about having the data.
The Layers Worth Having
For a BC business with 10 to 50 staff, a sensible arrangement usually includes:
- A local copy, for fast restores of the everyday problem, which is a deleted file or a corrupted folder
- An offsite copy, because a fire or a flood that takes the server takes anything beside it
- An immutable copy, one that cannot be altered or deleted even by someone with your administrator credentials, which is what defeats ransomware
- A documented recovery sequence, so the order of operations is not being worked out under pressure
- A tested restore, on a schedule, with the result written down
The last two get skipped most often and matter most.
Questions to Ask Whoever Manages Your IT
- When did we last restore from backup, not just run one?
- If the main server failed at 10am on a Tuesday, when would staff be working again?
- How much work would we lose?
- Where does the backup physically live, and can ransomware on our network reach it?
- Who performs the recovery, and what happens if they are unavailable?
- Is any of this written down?
If the answers are vague, that is the finding. You do not need a technical opinion to judge them.
Both, Not Either
Backup and disaster recovery are not competing options. Backup is the parts on the shelf, and you need them. Disaster recovery is the car in the driveway, and whether you need one depends on what a day of downtime costs you.
For a business losing $1,500 to $4,000 an hour when systems are down, the arithmetic usually answers itself.
Connect with our team today if you'd like help building or reviewing your backup and disaster recovery plan.
Don't wait until disaster strikes to find out your parts shelf is empty—or that you have no idea how to rebuild the car.
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