Recovery you've already rehearsed

What a backup has to survive

Backups exist for one bad day. The question is whether that day ends with your files back and staff working, or with a long week of guesses. When we review a new client's setup, backup is often the gap: alerts going to a former employee, laptops and Microsoft 365 left out, or a USB drive plugged into the same server it was meant to protect.

Real events in north Fulton

• Winter weather: FEMA's records show a federal emergency and a major disaster declaration for Fulton County after the 2014 winter storms. The January 2014 storm left thousands of commuters stuck on GA-400 and other highways overnight, and many offices stayed closed for days.
• Tropical storms: Fulton County was again included in declarations for Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Hurricane Helene in 2024, both of which brought down trees and power lines across the metro.
• Ransomware and account takeover: the most common reason a business needs a full restore. Attackers go after backups first, so the backup has to be protected from them.
• Office moves: Alpharetta companies change suites often. Equipment gets unplugged, boxed and driven across town, and a drive that fails in transit is still a failure.
• Ordinary mistakes: a folder dragged into the wrong place, a synced delete, an overwritten workbook the night before a deadline.

How we build it

• Full coverage: servers, key PCs, line-of-business databases and Microsoft 365 mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams.
• Three copies, two kinds of storage, one away from the office: a local copy for quick restores and a cloud copy for when the building is the problem.
• Immutable storage: backup copies locked against deletion or encryption, even by someone holding an admin password.
• Daily checks by a person: results are reviewed every business day, and failed jobs are fixed, not just noted.
• Scheduled test restores: we restore files and whole systems as practice and write down how long it took, so your recovery time is measured, not assumed.

Recovery is about people, too

Getting data back is half the job. The written recovery plan we build with you also covers who makes decisions, how phones are forwarded, which systems come back first, where people work if the office is closed and how clients or patients will hear from you. For a firm already on Microsoft 365, laptops and cloud phones, much of the answer is simple: people work from home while the office is sorted out. We confirm that works before you are relying on it.

Options for businesses that can't wait

For companies where a day of downtime costs more than the backup system, we can keep standby copies of key servers ready to start in the cloud or at a nearby colocation facility. Alpharetta has several professionally run data centers along its main business parkways, so an offsite copy can be close by and still on separate power from your office. For others, a protected cloud backup with a tested restore process is the right fit. We'll explain the trade-offs and costs in plain terms.

Power and the small stuff

Brief outages and surges cause a surprising share of damaged servers and corrupted files. We size battery backups for servers, firewalls and switches, set them to shut equipment down cleanly in a long outage, and track battery age so they're replaced before they fail.

Contracts, clients and insurers

Many Alpharetta firms sign contracts with larger customers that ask about backup and recovery. Cyber insurers ask too, and some want proof that backups are offline or immutable. Our test restore reports give you something concrete to show. Medical practices also need backup and contingency plans under the HIPAA Security Rule, and our records support that requirement.

Getting started

A backup check looks at what you protect today, where the copies live, who gets the alerts and how long a real restore would take. You get a short report with the gaps ranked by risk and a plan to close them, usually within the first month of service.

Questions about backup & disaster recovery