What the derecho taught small businesses about backups

On August 10, 2020, a derecho held 140 mile per hour winds over Cedar Rapids for roughly 45 minutes. Essentially every customer in the city lost power. Ten days later 25,000 Linn County customers were still dark, and some waited two weeks. It remains the costliest thunderstorm in United States history.

Plenty of businesses in the Corridor reopened within days. Others took months, and a few never did. The difference was rarely how much damage the building took. It was whether the business could still reach its own information.

Three things the fast reopeners had

• A copy of their data somewhere other than the building. On-site backup drives were destroyed or unreachable along with everything else

• A known answer to how long a restore takes. Not a hope, a number they had tested

• A way to work from somewhere else: files, email, and phones that did not depend on a server sitting in the damaged office

The uncomfortable question

Most businesses we meet do have a backup of some kind. Far fewer have ever restored from it. Almost none can say how long a full restore would take, or who would do it if the owner is dealing with a roof.

A backup that has never been tested is a hypothesis. The first time you find out whether it works should not be the week your building loses power.

What this looks like in practice

• Local and offsite copies, with the offsite copy immutable so ransomware cannot reach it either

• A written recovery target for each system: how much data you can afford to lose, and how long you can afford to be down

• A restore test every quarter, with the date and the result written down

• A short runbook that assumes the office is unreachable and the owner is busy

It is not only storms

The derecho is the story everyone here remembers, and 2008 and 2016 are the floods behind it. But the same plan covers the boring disasters that are far more likely: a failed drive, a deleted folder, an employee who left with files, or a ransomware email someone opened on a Tuesday.

If you are not sure where your business stands, we will walk through it with you and tell you honestly whether what you have is enough.