Here’s a question most small business owners can’t answer: if your office burned down tonight, could you recover your data? How about if ransomware encrypted every file on your network? Or if a disgruntled employee deleted everything before walking out?
If the answer is “I’m not sure” or “we have a hard drive somewhere,” you have a problem. And it’s a problem that costs nothing to prevent compared to what it costs when it happens.
Why Local Backups Aren’t Enough
An external hard drive plugged into your server is not a backup strategy. Here’s why:
- Ransomware encrypts network drives – If your backup drive is connected to the network, ransomware will encrypt it along with everything else
- Physical disasters destroy both – Fire, flood, or theft takes your backup with your primary data
- They fail silently – When’s the last time you verified your backup actually works? Most people find out it doesn’t when they need it most
- No versioning – If a file was corrupted last week and you only keep one copy, your backup is also corrupted
What Offsite Backup Looks Like
Proper offsite backup means your data is automatically copied to a secure location that’s physically separate from your office and logically separate from your network. If anything happens to your primary systems, your data is safe and recoverable.
We use CrashPlan for our clients. Here’s what that provides:
- Automatic daily backups – No human intervention required. It just runs.
- Offsite storage – Your data lives in a secure data center, not on a drive in your closet
- Versioning – Multiple versions of every file retained, so you can recover from any point in time
- Cross-platform – Works on Windows, Mac, and Linux
- Encryption – Data encrypted in transit and at rest
- Monitoring – We know immediately if a backup fails, not weeks later when you need it
The Part Most People Skip: Testing
A backup you’ve never tested is not a backup – it’s a hope. We regularly verify that restores actually work. When you need your data back, there should be zero surprises.
Who Needs This
Every business with data they can’t afford to lose. That’s every business. But especially:
- Companies with financial records, client data, or intellectual property
- Businesses in regulated industries (healthcare, legal, defense, insurance)
- Anyone who’s ever had a hard drive fail, a laptop stolen, or a ransomware scare
- Companies whose “backup” is a USB drive that hasn’t been updated in months
Standalone Service
You don’t need to sign up for full managed IT to get proper backups. We offer offsite backup and recovery as a standalone service – we deploy CrashPlan on your endpoints, configure retention policies, monitor backup health, and handle restores when you need them. Simple monthly fee.
Not sure if your current backups would actually save you? Call 844-867-1587 or email info@seashoreit.com. We’ll tell you honestly.