Losing business data is not a matter of if but when. Hard drives fail, ransomware strikes, and employees accidentally delete critical files. The question every Brisbane business owner should be asking is not whether to back up, but how often.
The Real Cost of Data Loss
For a small business with 5 to 50 staff, losing even a single day of data can mean thousands of dollars in lost productivity, recreated work and missed deadlines. The Australian Cyber Security Centre reports that the average cost of a cyber incident for small businesses exceeds $49,600. And that does not account for the reputational damage.
Yet many businesses we work with in Brisbane are still relying on weekly backups, USB drives, or worse, no backups at all.
Backup Frequency Depends on How Fast Your Data Changes
There is no single right answer. The ideal backup frequency depends on your Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. This is the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose.
Ask yourself: if your systems went down right now, how much work could you afford to redo?
If the answer is less than a day, you need at least daily backups. If losing even an hour of work would cause serious problems, you need continuous or real-time backup solutions.
What We Recommend for Brisbane SMBs
For most small businesses we support across Brisbane, Teneriffe, Newstead and Fortitude Valley, we recommend a 3-2-1 backup strategy:
3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of media, with 1 copy stored offsite or in the cloud.
Combine this with automated daily backups at minimum, and real-time backup for critical systems like your accounting software, CRM, and email. Cloud platforms like Microsoft 365 make this much easier than it used to be, but they do not back themselves up by default. That is a common misconception.
Test Your Backups Regularly
A backup that has never been tested is not a backup. We have seen businesses discover their backups were corrupted or incomplete only when they actually needed to restore. Schedule quarterly test restores at minimum.
If you are not sure whether your current backup setup would survive a real disaster, that is worth investigating before it becomes urgent.
Not sure if your backups would survive a real disaster? Our free IT Health Check can identify gaps in under 60 seconds.
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