Recovery and Continuity

A copy inside the estate is not a copy.

Mirroring, synchronising, and a spare drive in the cupboard all collapse against one and the same event, which happens to be the event this industry meets. Whoever holds administrative rights, whether an intruder or a member of staff working out a bitter final afternoon, can touch whatever those rights touch. Ransomware crews go looking for reachable copies before anything else, on the sound reasoning that a firm with a clean restore point has nothing to discuss with them.

What we hold sits under AES at 256 bits, on infrastructure sharing neither the tenant nor the network nor any credential belonging to whatever it covers. An administrator account gone bad can wreck anything inside your walls. It has no route at all to material stored beyond them.

The second reason custody matters in this sector is quieter. Reconstruction is not always possible at any price. A workstation can be rebuilt and a server can be replaced, but the working papers behind a filed return, the reconciliation trail behind a closed period, and the correspondence behind a suitability decision exist once. If they are gone, the firm cannot buy them back.

What each one covers, in plain terms.

• Working Document Versioning takes what a Windows machine is presently working on, two times daily, holding four weeks of it. Cheapest line on the page, and the one that answers the request people actually make.
• Whole Workstation Recovery lifts the entire machine across Linux, macOS, and Windows. A Windows box rebuilds onto bare hardware, a local copy may sit beside the cloud one, and the pool reaches 500 GB.
• Server Estate Recovery and Virtual Machine Recovery do as much for physical and for virtual servers, natively understanding Exchange and SharePoint and SQL and Oracle and MySQL, rebuilding onto bare hardware, on a 2,000 GB pool.
• Microsoft 365 Custody holds Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange well clear of the tenant. Mail keeps seven years, the collaboration workloads one, nothing charged for shared mailboxes, and 1 TB into the pool for every licensed user.
• Google Workspace Custody collects Gmail twelve times each day, Shared Drive and My Drive three, and tasks, calendars, and contacts once, restorable as far down as a single message.
• QuickBooks Online Ledger Custody holds the accounting file without interruption, counted per company.
• Directory Configuration Recovery keeps directory configuration with no limit on history, sets a change beside its last known good value, and reverses it in seconds.
• Restore Testing with Evidence backs nothing up at all. It proves that something else does.

Until it has been exercised, a restore is only an assumption.

The rule asks a firm to regularly test or otherwise monitor the effectiveness of its safeguards, and a written incident response plan is expected to be exercised rather than filed. Almost every firm believes its backups work. A material number discover otherwise on the day it matters, usually because a job silently stopped covering a machine that was rebuilt in March.

Name the systems that matter and the testing line runs an unattended restore against them, each week or each month, then returns evidence the recovery worked. Not a green tick somebody has to go and look at. A dated document, generated with no one remembering to generate it, and that last property is exactly what makes it worth anything twelve months on.

Which systems you nominate for testing is itself a record of how your firm ranks its own applications and data by criticality, and that ranking is a reasonable thing to be able to show.

The one system an accounting practice cannot afford to lose.

This line deserves separate treatment because of who reads this page. For an accounting practice, a bookkeeping firm, or a tax preparer, QuickBooks Online is not one application among many. It holds the trial balance, the client billing, the payroll history, and the audit trail, frequently for dozens of client companies at once.

No guarantee of recovery is offered by Intuit for your data. That, plainly, is why this line exists. A bad import, a merged customer list, a deleted account, a departing bookkeeper, or one compromised login can undo a quarter of work inside a platform that offers no route back. The exposure is not yours alone either, because the work belongs to a client who will reasonably ask what your firm had in place.

What the line does: captures without interruption and without supervision, downloads and restores and replicates in a click, holds storage without limit, opens from any device anywhere, reports the status of every backup and restore, encrypts under AES at 256 bits in storage and on the wire, and targets availability and service update at 99.99% or better. Counted per company file each month, so a practice covers every client company as its own line, added or dropped on its own.