Backup and disaster recovery for Southern Utah businesses — tested restores, a written recovery plan, and your data in copies that can't be encrypted, deleted, or quietly failing since 2023.
1. How much work can you afford to lose? A day of estimates? A weekend of reservations? A shift of production records? Whatever your answer, your backup schedule should match it — most don't.
2. How long can you afford to be down? Crews idle, front desk on paper, the line stopped. Put a dollar figure on a day. Now ask whether anything in your current setup was designed with that number in mind.
3. When did anyone last actually restore something? Not "check the backup ran" — restore a file, a mailbox, a whole server, and confirm it worked.
If the answer to #3 is "never," you don't have backups. You have hope.
| What's probably there now | Why it fails when it matters |
|---|---|
| An external drive someone swaps | It's in the same building as the disaster — and nobody's checked it since spring |
| Dropbox / OneDrive "syncing everything" | Sync faithfully copies the ransomware too. Sync is not backup |
| "The IT guy set something up in 2019" | Unmonitored backups fail silently. The average failure is discovered during the emergency |
| Microsoft 365 "it's in the cloud" | Microsoft's retention windows are short and not designed to be your backup — deleted means deleted, on a schedule |
Every ransom negotiation starts the same way: the victim discovers their backups were reachable, or untested, or both. When your backups are immutable, offsite, and restore-tested, ransomware stops being an existential negotiation and becomes a very bad day — measured in hours of restoration, not weeks of extortion. That's the whole strategy: make the ransom note irrelevant.
Every Silver Reef backup plan states two numbers up front: how much data you could lose (measured in hours of work) and how long recovery takes (measured in hours on a clock, not "we'll see"). We size the system to the numbers your business needs — not the other way around.
Yes. Cloud services keep your data available; they don't protect you from deletion, account compromise, or ransomware that syncs. Microsoft's own terms put data protection on you. We back the cloud up too.
Backup is part of the plan design, not an afterthought: server backup and recovery is priced per server by data volume, Microsoft 365 backup is included in the Secure plan, and every design gets restore-tested on schedule — all on the published price sheet. One rule regardless of tier: we won't run your IT on top of backups we can't prove. Standalone DR builds for server estates are scoped as fixed-price projects; see Servers, Cloud & Hybrid.
Ask them for the last restore-test report — the document showing a real restore, performed on a date, verified. That one artifact is the entire audit. If it doesn't exist, so does your backup, possibly.
With a local image-based backup: single files in minutes, whole servers typically within hours. The honest answer depends on your systems — which is what the free review is for.
Twenty minutes, no cost, written findings. The most valuable bad news you'll get this year.
Prefer to talk first? Call (435) 525-2998 — an engineer answers.
Prefer email? jeff@silverreefsystems.org