Backups that cover every place you work

Where backups usually fall short

When we review a new client's backups, the office server is usually covered, more or less. What's often missing is everything else. Microsoft 365 mail and files, which many people assume Microsoft backs up for them. Laptops of staff who rarely come in. The cloud accounting or practice software that nobody checked. And the alert emails about failed jobs often go to a person who left two years ago.

A spread-out team makes this worse. If a third of your people work from home, a third of your recent work may never touch the office at all.

What disrupts Dunwoody businesses

• Ransomware and stolen accounts: what most often forces a big restore at a small firm. Attackers hunt for backups before they launch an attack and wipe them if they can.
• Lost and stolen laptops: a bag left on a train or in a car at a Perimeter parking deck takes the work on that machine with it, unless it was synced and backed up.
• Mistakes: someone deletes a folder, saves over a shared spreadsheet, or a sync conflict quietly wipes out the newer version.
• Building events: in a shared office tower, a burst pipe on the floor above, a planned weekend power shutdown or an elevator outage can close your suite without warning.
• Weather: DeKalb County was named in federal disaster or emergency declarations after the 2014 ice storm, Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Helene in 2024, among other events. Falling trees take down power lines in Dunwoody's wooded neighborhoods, which matters when so many people work from home.

What we back up and how

• Full coverage: servers, important desktops, laptops, Microsoft 365 mailboxes and the files in OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, plus the databases behind your business software.
• Several copies in different places: a local copy for fast restores where there's a server, and a cloud copy outside the building. We follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them offsite.
• Protected from attackers: immutable cloud backups that can't be deleted or encrypted even by someone with stolen admin credentials.
• Checked every business day: a person reviews backup results, and failures are fixed rather than ignored.
• Practice restores: we run trial recoveries of files and full machines and time them, so your recovery time is a measured number rather than a guess.

Recovery is about people, not just data

Restoring files is half the job. The rest is getting staff working again. The written plan names the person in charge during an outage, puts systems in the order they'll be restored, covers phone forwarding and temporary workspaces, and includes a short message for clients or patients.

For many Dunwoody businesses the answer is reassuring. If your files, email and phones already run on Microsoft 365, and laptops are managed and backed up, people can simply work from home while the office is sorted out. We test that before you need it, rather than finding out during an outage.

If an hour of downtime costs you real money, critical servers can be replicated to the cloud and switched on there in a matter of hours. A smaller firm may only need a good offsite copy and a restore it has rehearsed. The right choice depends on what an outage would cost you.

Power protection

Brief flickers and power surges do real harm, from corrupted databases to dead network switches. Battery units for the server, firewall and switches are sized to the load, watched by our monitoring, configured to power equipment off safely if an outage drags on and swapped out before they age out. For owners who run the business from home, a small battery backup for the router and main computer is often worth the money.

Questions about backup & disaster recovery