Backups you know will restore

The backup you have may not be the backup you need

Backups produce more bad news than anything else in our first reviews. Often the job dates back years. Failure alerts go to an address nobody reads. It grabs the file server yet skips email, OneDrive, every laptop and the hosted bookkeeping app. Now and then the whole plan is an external disk hanging off the server, close enough that ransomware scrambles it too. Backup and disaster recovery for Forsyth County businesses starts with finding out which of those is true for you.

What puts data at risk in Cumming and Forsyth County

• Ransomware and stolen logins: the top cause of whole-company restores we see. Intruders hunt for the backup console early, because wiping it gives them leverage.
• Worn-out hardware: drives and servers fail, usually without notice and often at month-end.
• Mistakes: a deleted project folder, an overwritten spreadsheet or a OneDrive sync that removed a file everywhere at once.
• Storms and power: thunderstorms, ice and the remnants of tropical systems bring down trees and lines across north Georgia. Power in the county comes from Sawnee EMC or Georgia Power, and after a major storm the lights may stay off for a day or more. Back roads in north Forsyth and near the lake tend to lose lines more often than the GA-400 corridor.
• Building trouble: water from a failed sprinkler line, smoke from the neighboring unit or a stolen server at a shop in an industrial park can take out the computers and the backup sitting on the shelf beside them.

How we build it

• Scope it fully: servers and important desktops, plus Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint sites, Teams chats and the databases your core software writes to.
• Spread the copies: an on-site appliance for fast file recovery and a second set in a remote data center, so you meet the familiar 3-2-1 standard.
• Make it attack-resistant: immutable or offline copies that an intruder with admin rights still can't erase.
• Check it daily: a person reviews backup results every business day and fixes failures rather than filing them.
• Test it: we run planned recovery drills, from single folders up to complete machines, and record the timings for you.

Recovery means people working again

Bringing data back is half the work. A written recovery plan says who makes decisions, where staff go if the office is closed, how phones get redirected, the order systems get restored and how word gets to clients or patients. For a firm that already runs on laptops and Microsoft 365, the plan may be short: people work from home while we restore anything that lived in the office. We test that before it is needed.

Some businesses can't wait a day. A medical practice, a distributor shipping orders or a manufacturer with a production schedule may want a warm replica of its main servers hosted offsite that can be switched on the same day. Others are fine with a solid offsite backup and a proven restore process. We'll tell you which fits and what it costs.

Industry specifics

• Health care: HIPAA expects a contingency plan, including data backup, disaster recovery and emergency mode operations. We build and document all three.
• Construction: estimates, bids, plan sets and job photos often live on one person's laptop. We bring them into a backed-up system.
• Manufacturing: machine programs, recipes and configuration files on plant PCs are easy to forget and hard to recreate. We back them up separately.

Power protection

Short outages and surges do more harm than people think. We size battery backups for servers, firewalls and switches, connect them so equipment shuts down cleanly during a long outage and swap batteries before they quit. It isn't exciting work, but it saves a lot of corrupted files after a summer storm.

Questions about backup & disaster recovery