Backup & Disaster Recovery for Greater Sudbury & Northern Ontario

Backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the documented, tested process for getting your business back up and running, within an acceptable timeframe, after an outage, ransomware event, or hardware failure. You need both, designed together. A backup you can't restore in time to save the business isn't really a backup.

Yes. Microsoft replicates data for service availability but does not protect long-term against accidental deletion, ransomware, malicious insiders, or retention-policy errors. Microsoft's own service agreement recommends third-party backup. We deploy dedicated Microsoft 365 backup covering Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams with documented retention.

We schedule documented recovery tests for managed clients, restoring individual files, full mailboxes, and where applicable full server images, so we know recovery actually works before a real incident and not during one. Tested recovery is what separates a real backup program from one that only 'runs'.

Backups designed so ransomware can't reach or encrypt them: immutable / off-network copies, separate credentials from the production environment, alerting on suspicious backup behaviour, and tested restore procedures that don't depend on the compromised environment. Most ransomware victims we see had backups, but the backups were just encrypted along with everything else.

It depends on the systems, the budget, and the design. For Microsoft 365 and file-level workstation data, RPOs of a few hours and RTOs of hours to a day are typical. For servers running line-of-business apps, RPOs of 1 hour and RTOs of 4 hours are achievable with the right design. We start by asking what your business can actually afford to lose and be without, then design to that instead of the other way around.

Yes. We back up Windows and Linux servers (physical and virtual), Hyper-V and VMware environments, SQL databases, and NAS-based file shares. Backups are stored to local, off-site, and immutable cloud copies as appropriate, with monitoring and documented recovery procedures.

Cyber insurance underwriters now specifically ask about immutable backups, backup segmentation from production, backup credentials separated from domain admin, and tested recovery. Answering 'yes' to all four is increasingly required for coverage and favourable premiums. We build backup programs that produce documented evidence for each.

For file and Microsoft 365 restores, recovery runs against your existing environment. For full server failures or ransomware events that take down production, we can stand up recovered workloads in cloud (Azure, Wasabi, or similar) or on standby hardware, per your DR plan. The right answer depends on your recovery-time targets and budget, designed in advance rather than improvised at 2am.

Retention depends on the data class and your obligations. Operational data typically needs 30-90 days of daily / weekly / monthly points. Regulated data (health records under PHIPA, financial records under CRA rules, legal work product) often needs multi-year retention. We map each dataset to a retention policy that satisfies your obligations without paying to keep everything forever.

Yes. Common migrations include moving off consumer cloud sync (Dropbox, Google Drive personal) mistaken for backup, off end-of-life on-prem backup appliances, and off legacy tape systems. Migrations run in parallel with the existing backups until the new platform is verified and a full restore has been tested, so there's no gap in coverage.

Local copies give you the fastest possible restore of large datasets. This is critical when a server dies at month-end or a shared drive gets encrypted. Cloud copies protect against physical disasters (fire, flood, theft) and ransomware that reaches local storage. The right design uses both, sized for the data and the recovery-time targets.

You own the data. Our engagements are structured so that if you ever leave, you can take the backup data with you in a portable format, or hand off backup credentials and documentation to another provider. We don't hold clients hostage with proprietary formats or opaque configurations.