Every outage ends.
Know when yours will.
Data backup makes copies. Disaster recovery decides what happens next: how long until you're working again, and how much work has to be redone. We plan both around what the business can afford, then prove the plan by restoring from it.
Without a recovery plan, a backup is just a copy.
Ask an owner whether the business is backed up and the answer is almost always yes. It's usually true, too. Somewhere, on a schedule, copies are being made.
Most outages aren't dramatic. A server that doesn't come back after an update. A shared folder deleted on a Thursday and missed the following week. A pipe that bursts over the server closet. Ransomware is on the list, but it is one entry, not the whole story. Whichever it is, a copy answers only one question: does the data still exist? The outage asks four more, all at once.
Most businesses already have answers to all four, and that is the problem. How often the copies run has already decided how much work you would lose. How long a restore takes is already fixed by how much there is and where it's kept. Nobody knows that number, because nobody has timed one. The plan exists. It just wasn't chosen, and it has never been tried.
A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a plan.
What do we need back first?
Your backups can’t say.
A backup holds everything, in no order of importance.
How long until we’re working again?
Your backups can’t say.
Not until somebody has timed a restore.
How much work do we have to redo?
Hope it ran last night.
You lose everything since the last copy — on a schedule most owners have never been asked about.
Who does what first?
Your backups can’t say.
Either it’s written down, or it’s improvised.
Two of those four are yours alone
Of the four questions an outage asks, two belong to the plan: what comes back first, and who does what. Those are covered below. The other two are business decisions only you can make, and every recovery plan comes down to them. Neither one is an IT setting.
How much work do we have to redo?
If the last good copy was taken last night, everything since then is gone: the morning's invoices, the revised drawings, the orders entered before lunch. For some data that's an irritation. For some, a day's work can't be recreated at all. Your answer decides how often copies have to run.
How long until we're working again?
Put a price on an hour of the business standing still: payroll with nothing to work on, orders not taken, customers waiting on a callback, a deadline that doesn't move. Some systems can be down for a day before anyone outside notices. Others can't go an hour. Your answer decides what comes back first, and how fast bringing it back has to be.
Shorter on either side costs more. Faster recovery and more frequent copies take more to run, which is exactly why this starts with the business rather than the technology. Once you know what an hour down really costs, you know what protecting against it is worth: the systems the day depends on get the fast recovery, and the ones that can wait until tomorrow don't eat the budget.
What turns copies into a recovery
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Recovery planning
A plan built on your two answers
Device by device, we agree with you which systems matter most and how often each is backed up, so the schedule follows the business rather than a default.
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Local & cloud backup
Copies that match the plan
Backups run automatically on the schedule you agreed. A local copy makes everyday restores fast, and a second copy goes offsite to the cloud, so a fire or flood in the building doesn’t take both.
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Recovery testing
Proof, on a schedule
On a schedule agreed with you, we restore to a separate location and confirm it worked — and the backup jobs themselves are monitored, so a failure is caught rather than discovered during an outage.
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Recovery process
Recovery that doesn’t depend on one person
Recovery follows the same proven steps for every client, so any PAconnect technician can run it and report the results back to you.
Found on a quiet Tuesday. Not during an outage.
Backup software reports success when a copy is made. That says nothing about whether the copy opens, whether the application on top of it starts, or whether the data is as recent as you think. The only way to know is to restore it.
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Restore what matters most
The systems at the top of your recovery order, not a sample file picked because it's small.
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Keep the business out of it
The restore happens somewhere separate from the live systems, so nobody at the office notices a test is running.
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Check it actually works
Files open, the accounting system starts, and the data is as recent as it should be — confirmed on the restored copy, not taken from the backup job's own report.
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Close the gap
If something doesn't come back the way it should, it gets fixed and tested again, rather than waiting for an outage to raise it.
Every problem a test finds is one an outage doesn't get to.
The day it wasn't a test
A client was hit by ransomware, and the data on their server was encrypted — all of it. We removed the threat and restored the server from backup. They were working again within a day, with little to no data lost.
A PAconnect client. Details kept general so they can't be identified.
What owners ask about backup and recovery
We already have backups. What would actually change?
Maybe not the backups, at first. What changes is knowing what you have: which systems are backed up, how often, where the copies are kept, and whether they would bring you back in the time the business can afford. If the answer is yes, you’ve confirmed something worth knowing. If it isn’t, you’ve found out on your terms instead of an outage’s.
Isn't Microsoft 365 already backed up?
Not in the way most people assume. Microsoft keeps the service running and guards against failures on its side, such as its hardware and its data centers. Protecting your data from what happens on your side is largely left to you: a file deleted by mistake, a mailbox removed when someone leaves, documents encrypted and synced back to the cloud. Microsoft calls this shared responsibility. Its built-in retention and recycle bins let you recover some of that for a limited time, but they aren't a backup you control and can restore from on your own schedule. Google Workspace works on broadly the same principle. We can add Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace backup, so a deleted mailbox or an encrypted folder has a copy you control.
How often do you test restores?
On a schedule we set with you, because how often it is worth doing depends on what the system is. A test means restoring the data to a separate location and confirming it came back, not just reading the backup software's report. Those reports are watched too, so a job that quietly stops working is caught rather than found during an outage.
What happens if we're hit by ransomware?
Recovery works the way it does for any other outage: restore from a clean copy, most important systems first. The difference is that ransomware goes after backups too, and an infection can sit unnoticed for a while. That is what the offsite copy is for: it is encrypted and out of reach of your network, so an infection on your side cannot encrypt or delete it. Older copies are kept rather than overwritten, so there is something from before the infection to go back to. Keeping ransomware out in the first place is the job of our Cyber Security service.
How far back can we restore?
Backups run daily, and older copies are condensed into weekly and then monthly ones, so you can reach back a long way, with less detail the further you go. If you need to keep more, a larger storage pool extends it. It matters more than it sounds, because a deleted folder or a quiet infection often isn’t noticed for weeks.
What does this cost?
It depends on your two answers. Shorter downtime and less lost work mean more frequent copies and faster recovery, and those cost more to run. That's why the conversation starts with what an hour of downtime costs the business: it tells you what protection is worth, so you're not paying for fast recovery on data that could wait a day, or economising on the systems that can't.
What do RTO and RPO mean?
They're the industry's names for the two questions on this page. Recovery time objective (RTO) is how long until you're working again. Recovery point objective (RPO) is how much work you can afford to redo, measured back to the last good copy.
Find out how long an outage lasts. Before one does.
A strategic discovery session is a conversation about how the business runs: which systems the day depends on, what an hour without them costs, and how much work you could stand to redo. Those answers are the start of any recovery plan, whoever ends up running it.
Why businesses bring all their technology to one team →
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