Plenty of Monterey offices find out how good their backup is on the worst morning of the year. The server won't start, or a shared folder has turned into files nobody can open. Then the external drive on the shelf turns out to have stopped copying last spring. If it's broken right now, call.
If nothing's broken yet, good. This is the cheapest moment you'll get to learn what a bad morning would actually look like, and to fix it before it comes.
Signs Your Backups Won't Hold Up
A backup nobody has ever restored from is a hope.
We take over a lot of offices, and the same setups keep turning up. There's the USB drive plugged into the server. It sits in the same room as the thing it protects, so a burst pipe takes both. There's the sync folder everyone treats as a backup, which copies a ransomware-scrambled file to every other computer within seconds. And there's the job that failed quietly in March. The error emails went to the person who set it up, and that person left two years ago.
Other warning signs are simpler. Nobody can say when the last good copy was made. A restore would mean driving a drive to someone's house. Your email and documents live in Microsoft 365 with no copy anywhere else.
Medical and dental offices on the Peninsula carry one more burden. HIPAA expects you to be able to get patient records back after an outage or an attack, and to show how you'd do it. A dental practice in Seaside that can't open its charts on a Monday has a full waiting room and nothing to look at.
Our Backup and Disaster Recovery Services
Most plans start with Cloud Backup. Your server and the computers that matter get copied on a schedule to a data center well away from the Central Coast. Older versions are kept too, so you can roll a file back to how it looked before the mistake. If the office floods, that copy is still dry.
A lot of businesses keep email and documents in Microsoft's cloud and figure that covers it. Microsoft 365 Backup fills the gap people don't see until they need it. Microsoft's job is keeping the service up. Getting back a mailbox that a departing manager emptied, or a SharePoint library deleted in the spring, falls mostly to you. The built-in recycle bins only reach back so far. We keep a separate copy you can restore from on your own timeline.
Copies alone won't keep a business open through a week without power. Business Continuity Planning is the written plan for that week. It covers who works from where, which systems come back first, and how long each part of the business can stand to be down. We write it with you and walk your managers through it before anyone needs it.
Sometimes there's no backup at all, or it's too old to help. That's when Data Recovery comes in, for deleted files, a hard drive that has started clicking, or a server that ransomware got to first. We find out what can still be pulled back and give you a straight answer about the chances before any work starts.
Backup and Disaster Recovery for Monterey County Businesses
Backups get tested by local events here. Winter storms knock out power in Carmel Valley and Big Sur, and PG&E shutoffs during fire season can leave an office dark for days. A backup that only lives on a server in that office is out of reach for exactly as long as the power is.
Compliance shapes the setup, too. Defense contractors working with the Naval Postgraduate School or the Defense Language Institute have NIST 800-171 and CMMC rules about controlled data. Those rules follow the data into its backup copies, so it matters where they're stored and who can open them. We plan the backup around those requirements from day one.
Our clients are spread out. Some are in Pacific Grove or Pebble Beach. Others run offices in Carmel-by-the-Sea and Seaside, or out past Marina in Castroville and Salinas, and a good number sit further off in Watsonville, Hollister, or San Juan Bautista. Most restores happen remotely. When a server needs hands on it, someone drives over from New Monterey.
Why Local Offices Trust Us With Their Backups
We've handled IT for Monterey County since 2008 and support more than 250 local businesses. A dead server or a ransomware outbreak gets a technician within 15 minutes, because we log both as critical. The emergency line answers 24/7, which matters because disasters rarely wait for business hours.
For managed IT clients, backups are set up during onboarding with the rest of the base plan. No extra charge. Every quote comes in writing before work begins.
You can read Ready.gov's disaster planning guidance for small businesses to get a feel for what a plan should cover. When you'd rather have someone build it with you, call (831) 649-5050. You can also see the rest of our local computer support and services for offices across the county.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should a small business back up its data?
For most offices, servers and shared files should be copied at least once a day. Anything that changes all day long, like a practice management database or an accounting file, deserves more frequent copies. We set the schedule by asking how much work you could stand to redo.
Is OneDrive or SharePoint sync the same as a backup?
No. Sync copies every change to every device, including deletions and files scrambled by ransomware. A backup keeps older versions somewhere separate, so you can go back to the copy from before the problem.
What's the difference between backup and disaster recovery?
Backup is the copy of your data. Disaster recovery is everything needed to put that data back to work after a fire, a flood, or an attack, including the equipment and the order systems come back in.
Can ransomware reach our backups?
It can if the backups sit on a drive or share the infected computers can see. Attackers look for backups on purpose. A good setup keeps at least one copy offsite that the office network can't change or delete, and you can read more in CISA's ransomware guidance.
How much does backup and disaster recovery cost?
It depends on how much data you have, how many servers and computers need protecting, and how long you want older versions kept. For managed IT clients, backups are part of the base plan. Everyone else gets a written quote after a short call.