Data Protection & Recovery

Backup & Recovery
in Coventry & the West Midlands

Automatic daily backups, kept off-site, with file restores usually back to you in under half an hour.

Why it matters

Most backup conversations happen after data loss

Businesses around Coventry and the West Midlands come to us either with a backup that's silently been failing for months, or with no backup in place at all. The conversation only starts once something's already gone wrong.

We run automatic off-site backups for our clients so when something does go wrong, the answer to "do we have a copy of that" is always yes. Server data and virtual machines are kept in a separate copy from your live setup, and so is your Microsoft 365 environment. When something gets deleted or corrupted, we can usually have it back to you within 20 to 30 minutes.

What gets protected

Two products, doing two different jobs

Backup isn't one thing. There are different kinds of data sitting in different places, and each one needs its own approach.

Servers and virtual machines

We use Altaro Backup, an image-based backup product. It captures an image of the whole server in one go, including the operating system, your applications, settings and data. If a server fails completely, we can restore the entire machine without rebuilding it from scratch.

Microsoft 365 data

Your emails, OneDrive files, SharePoint sites and Teams content all live in Microsoft's cloud. We use Hornet Security Altaro Backup to keep an independent copy of all of it. There's more on why that matters in the next section.

Off-site and daily

Backups don't help much if they're sitting on the same equipment they're meant to protect. Both your server backups and your Microsoft 365 backups are stored separately from your live environment, and both run automatically every day. There's nothing for your team to remember to do.

A quick heads-up

Microsoft doesn't back up your Microsoft 365 data

There's a common assumption that Microsoft is taking care of backup once your data is in the cloud. They aren't, and it's worth clearing up early.

Microsoft hosts the service and keeps it running, but protecting what's in your account is your responsibility, and that's their own position.

If a file gets deleted, whether by accident or on purpose, you have around 93 days to recover it from the OneDrive or SharePoint recycle bin. Deleted emails are kept for far less, often only a couple of weeks. After that, it's gone for good.

A separate backup of your Microsoft 365 data is what protects you from accidental deletions, a ransomware attack on a user account, an ex-employee clearing out their mailbox on the way out, or a configuration mistake wiping a SharePoint library.

Recovery in practice

Getting your data back

When something's been deleted or corrupted, what matters most is how quickly you can have it back. Most file restores take 20 to 30 minutes from the moment you contact us.

The process is straightforward. You contact us either by phone or by raising a support ticket. We confirm what's missing and from what date, and then we pull the file, folder or mailbox out of the backup and put it back in place.

The same engineers who set your backups up are the ones answering the phone when you need a restore. There's no separate team to be briefed on your setup, which is why we can usually move quickly.

20–30 mins

Typical file restore time

Business continuity

When something bigger goes wrong

Day-to-day, backup is about getting deleted files back. The same setup is also what keeps you trading when something more serious happens. Ransomware can lock down a whole machine, and the only clean way back from that is a full restore from an off-site copy that the attackers couldn't reach.

The image-based backups of your servers mean we can rebuild them from scratch when we need to. Your Microsoft 365 data can be restored mailbox by mailbox or in bulk depending on what's been hit.

That's why we treat backup as part of the wider conversation about your IT security and your servers, not a separate add-on. Our cyber security and servers pages cover the rest of that picture.

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Get your data protected

If you run a business in Coventry or the West Midlands and you're not sure exactly what's being backed up right now, or whether a restore would actually work when you needed it, that's a conversation worth having. Get in touch and we'll go through your current setup with you.

Backup & Recovery
in Coventry & the West Midlands

Most backup conversations happen after data loss