Guide
Backups for a small office, plainly explained
6 minute read · 2026-10-19
A backup is a copy you have restored from
Plenty of offices have an external drive that was plugged in once, or a cloud account nobody has logged into in a year. Those can be part of a backup. They are not a backup until someone has pulled a file back out of them and opened it.
The test question is simple: if the main office computer died this afternoon, how long until you were working again, and what would be gone?
What to back up
Start with the computer the business cannot lose. In most small offices that is one or two machines: the one with the accounting file, the practice or agency software, or years of scanned documents.
Then email and shared files. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace keep your mail and files available, but deleted items only stay recoverable for a limited time, and a mistake or a compromised account can sync straight across every device. A separate backup of mailboxes and OneDrive or Google Drive covers that gap.
Keep more than one copy, in more than one place
A common rule is three copies of important data, on two kinds of storage, with one copy off site. For a small office that might be the computer itself, a local backup, and a cloud backup.
The off-site copy matters most for the bad days: a fire, a theft, or ransomware that encrypts everything it can reach on the office network. A backup that stays plugged in and writable can be encrypted along with everything else.
Test the restore
Put a date on the calendar and restore something: a file, a folder, or a whole mailbox. Write down how long it took. That number is your real recovery time.
ITAKY's IT support plans include cloud backup of every user's email and OneDrive or Google Drive, a full backup of up to 2 key computers (more are $10 a month each), and a test restore every quarter. If you would rather start by finding out where you stand, the $295 IT Health Check looks at your backups along with everything else.