Backup & Disaster Recovery Services Melbourne

Backup is the copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the plan and the capability to get your business operating again after something goes wrong. Having backups without a recovery plan is common, and it is why businesses with perfectly good backups still lose a week of trading. Backup answers whether the data still exists; disaster recovery answers how quickly you can trade again.

Three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy held offsite. It is a long-standing baseline because it protects against the three common failure modes at once: hardware failure, site loss such as fire or flood, and accidental deletion. Modern practice extends it further, adding one immutable copy that cannot be altered or deleted even by an administrator account because ransomware operators specifically target backups.

Yes. Both Microsoft and Google operate a shared responsibility model: they guarantee the availability of the platform, but your data remains your responsibility. Retention for deleted items is limited, and once it lapses the data is gone. Accidental deletion, a departing employee clearing a mailbox, and ransomware encrypting synced files are all scenarios the platform’s own retention will not cover. A separate third-party backup closes that gap.

That depends on how much data your business can afford to lose your recovery point objective. If losing a day of work is tolerable, daily backups may be adequate. If your finance or job management system is updated constantly, you may need hourly or continuous protection. We set the schedule against what the business can actually absorb, rather than applying a default and hoping it fits.

Only if they are designed to. Ransomware operators routinely search for and encrypt backups before triggering the main attack, and they often sit in the network for weeks beforehand. Effective protection requires immutable backups that cannot be altered or deleted during a retention period, credentials separated from your main domain, an offsite or air-gapped copy, and retention long enough to reach back past the initial compromise. Regular backups are also one of the ACSC Essential Eight mitigation strategies.

By restoring from them on a schedule not by checking that the job reported success. Failed and silently incomplete backups are extremely common, and most businesses discover the problem at the worst possible moment. We monitor every backup job, investigate failures, and perform test restores so recovery is something you have already seen work rather than something you hope will work.

It depends on what failed, how much data is involved, and what recovery capability is in place. Restoring a single deleted file takes minutes. Recovering a failed server from an offsite copy takes considerably longer, unless virtual standby is configured so a replica can be brought online while the original is rebuilt. We define a target recovery time with you during planning, then design the solution to meet it and test against it.

Most Australian cyber insurance policies now ask specific questions about backup practices, multi-factor authentication, and patching at application and renewal time, and answers that do not reflect reality can affect a claim. We document your backup configuration, retention, and test results so you have evidence to support what you declare. Check the specific requirements with your broker, as policies vary considerably.