Cloud & Backup

Setup starts at €199 for a properly configured backup with off-site copies and a tested restore. Ongoing storage depends on how much data you have and where it goes — Backblaze B2 is usually a few euro a month for a small business, and I pass that through at cost rather than marking it up. The expensive option is the one you don't have on the day you need it.

No, and this is the single most common misunderstanding I meet. Sync means a mistake replicates instantly to every copy — if ransomware encrypts a folder, the encrypted version syncs to the cloud within seconds. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both say so plainly in their own terms: your data is your responsibility. A real backup is a separate copy, held separately, that can be rolled back to a point in time.

Three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one copy off site. It sounds like jargon and it is really just "don't keep everything in one building on one kind of device". A typical small-business setup here is the live data, a local NAS or external drive, and an encrypted copy in Backblaze B2 — which satisfies all three without being complicated to run.

Because it gets restored. An untested backup is a belief, not a backup. Part of the setup is doing a real restore in front of you so you have seen files come back, and for ongoing clients that gets repeated periodically rather than assumed. Plenty of businesses discover their backup had been failing silently for eight months only on the morning they need it.

The backup has to be immutable or versioned, meaning the attacker can't reach back and delete or encrypt the copies from inside your network. That's a configuration decision, not a product you buy, and it is the difference between a bad Tuesday and a business-ending one. Pair it with the basics from the security mistakes post.

Yes, and you should. Microsoft's retention is not a backup — a deleted mailbox or a SharePoint site wiped by a departing employee is recoverable only inside a short window, and not always then. A dedicated 365 backup costs little and is the thing people wish they'd had.