Backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the plan that turns that copy back into a working business — systems, access and people. Plenty of organizations have the first and discover during an incident that they never had the second.

That's a decision, not a default. We work out how much downtime and data loss the business can actually absorb, then design and cost the recovery around those targets — because faster recovery costs more, and the right answer differs by system.

Yes, and this is the part most providers skip. Recovery testing is a defined part of the service, because an untested backup is an assumption. The time to find out a restore doesn't work is a scheduled test, not the morning after a fire.

In 40+ years, close to all of them — fires, blizzards and hurricanes, along with the human ones: data theft, ransomware and deliberate sabotage. We've published the full account of getting a cold storage trucking company running again after a fire.

On-premise, in the cloud, or both, depending on what you're protecting and what you have to comply with. Offsite copies are the point of the exercise, so a single incident at a single location can't take out both your systems and your only means of recovering them.

Yes. Planning, remote backup and recovery testing can be delivered as a standalone engagement. It's also built into our flat-rate managed IT plans, which is where it tends to work best — the team that runs your systems is the team that has to bring them back.