Data Backup for Calgary Businesses: 6 Essential Checks

Imagine opening a shared folder before meeting with a client and finding that the files you need are missing. Someone remembers that backups run nightly. But nobody knows how to restore them.

What do you do next?

For a Calgary business, that question deserves an answer before something goes wrong. A good backup plan should explain what is backed up, who checks it, and how your team will recover its work.

These six checks can help you understand your current setup.

1. Check what is actually being backed up

Focus on what would need to be known by your team for a normal work day. This could be anything from customer records, accounting data and project folders to email and documents at individual computers.

Get your IT provider to verify which locations are included. The only issue with this is that a backup of your shared drive does not indicate if the files saved on an employee’s laptop are backed up.

Recommendations from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security include identifying critical business data and keeping copies of systems that contain it. It also recommends verifying that those systems can be restored properly. Check out its baseline security controls for small and medium businesses.

An easy way to get started is with just a list: the data, its location, and its user.

2. Decide how much recent work you could afford to lose

Be precise in your question: how much work will your team have to redo if you restore the backup from YESTERDAY?

For example, say a backup completes at midnight and a problem occurs at 4 p.m. If no newer recovery point exists, changes made during that working day may be missing from the restored copy.

That may mean re-entering orders, rebuilding a proposal, or asking staff to recreate notes.

Discuss backup frequency in terms of your actual workload. The Cyber Centre’s backup guidance recommends setting a backup schedule and prioritising business-critical data.

Some components of your business might not require the same frequency of scheduling. Explain what changes most frequently and what would be hardest to reproduce.

3. Find out who notices a failed backup

Ask your provider to take you through how it is that a backup issue turns into a support chore.

Who receives the alert? Who investigates it? How do they verify that the next backup was successful?

These questions come in particularly handy when multiple people share the responsibility of IT. An employee assuming that the provider checks everything vs a provider who expects someone at the office to report a warning.

Assign a process owner and an alternate contact. The Cyber Centre’s foundational security checklist is a useful starting point for reviewing backup coverage, frequency, secure storage, and recovery testing.

You should know who to contact about a backup problem without searching through old emails.

4. Check whether a backup can survive the same incident

What if the office computer and the drive next to it were wrecked or were stolen?

Inquire about the location of your other copies and how they differ from the original files. Also ask who is able to view, edit or remove those backups.

The Cyber Centre suggests that you have an offline backup and follow the 3–2–1 rule, namely three copies of your information on two different media types, one copy off site. These precautions are explained further in its backup guidance.

Ask your provider to explain the arrangement in simple language. You can appreciate which copy will still be available, in the event that your normal framework is unavailable.

5. Ask for a recovery test

A successful backup notification is reassuring. A completed restore provides different evidence: whether the saved files can actually be recovered.

Schedule a controlled test with your IT provider. Select a sample folder and recover it back to another secure location. Get someone who uses those files to ensure they can be opened and they have the right content.

Keep a record of the time taken and any issues faced.

The Cyber Centre recommends testing backups regularly in its security measures for small and medium organizations.

And if your business relies on a particular application, talk about testing recovery of that- too. Having some documents restored does not mean that the whole business system is “operational”.

6. Decide what gets restored first

Imagine your team arrives tomorrow morning and has no access to its usual systems. What would you need first?

A firm with an accounting focus might prioritise its client documents and perhaps, its accounting application. Perhaps a contractor requires the latest job details and schedules. Your priorities need to be in line with how your business works.

Organize the order, those responsible for recovery decisions and their contact information. Store those instructions in a place that is accessible even if the systems you generally use to access them are not functional.

The Cyber Centre’s best practice guidance on back-ups states that recovery procedures, roles and responsibilities should be documented.

Check that plan whenever you add critical software, change providers or migrate key files.

Start with one clear question

The process of reviewing your backups does not need to be exhaustive in every technical detail.

Start by asking:

“If we lost access to our most important files today, how would you get them back?”

With the answer, identify what requires your focus. You might find that coverage is missing, responsibilities are murky or a recovery process has never been exercised.