Unmanaged Backups Aren’t Backups. And Other Things We Tell Every Customer.

Before you buy backup software, answer one question: how much work do you do in a day?

Not the big picture. Just the actual changes — files saved, invoices entered, records updated. Twenty minutes? An hour? Now ask yourself how much of that you could redo tomorrow, on top of everything you already have scheduled.

That number is your backup strategy. Not a sales pitch, not a package tier. Just the math of your own business.

The Real Cost of Lost Data

Here’s the framework I walk every customer through.

Say you make about 20 minutes of meaningful changes to your data every day. Conservative for most businesses.

Lose yesterday — you’re redoing 20 minutes. Annoying. Lose last week — that’s an hour and 40 minutes of rework while you’re still trying to keep up with this week. Lose last year — if you can even reconstruct it — that’s 86 hours.

Now picture you run a print and sign shop. You’ve got years of customer artwork, templates, and project files. That data has a long life. Losing it doesn’t just cost you time — it costs you the ability to serve repeat customers who expect you to have their work on file.

On the other end, I’ve got clients where data from three years ago has zero value — but five people are working daily making changes to files, documents, and databases. High frequency, shorter life expectancy. Completely different conversation.

Two things actually determine what your backup plan should look like: frequency of change and data life expectancy. Every business lands somewhere different on both.

Local Backup vs. Cloud Backup

There are two places your backups can go, and most businesses should be using both.

Local backup goes to an attached storage device on your network. Fast to back up, fast to restore. The downside is it’s in the same building — fire, flood, or theft takes the backup with everything else.

Cloud backup goes offsite automatically. Slower to pull a large restore, but your data isn’t in the building. If something happens on-site, you’re covered.

Local gives you speed. Cloud gives you safety. We can set up either or both depending on what makes sense for your operation. If you need a local storage device, we have recommendations on our Recommended Products page — something attached and redundant so a single drive failure doesn’t take out your local backup along with everything else.

Unmonitored Backups Are Not Backups

Backup software fails quietly. A job fails — wrong credentials, full disk, network issue — and it just moves on. Reports back to nobody. You have no idea until the day you need a restore.

I’ve talked to business owners who had software running for over a year and felt completely covered. Then something went wrong. The jobs had been failing for months.

That’s not bad luck. That’s an unmonitored backup.

Backups are the one service we sell where we include a monitoring fee — and we won’t sell them any other way. Every morning we check every backup job on every device we cover. If something fails overnight, we know before you do. We fix it before it becomes your problem.

You will never hear us say this about any other IT product. We’ll sell you a Windows PC, help you set it up, and if you never want to pay us to patch and maintain it, that’s your call. When something breaks, you pay us by the hour to fix it. That’s a valid model and plenty of our customers run that way. But backups are different. Unmonitored backups are not backups. We won’t do it the other way.

Managed Backups vs. Managed Services — What’s the Difference?

Some IT companies charge $100–150 per computer per month for a full managed services package — remote monitoring, patch management, helpdesk, automated updates. We can do that. Some businesses want it.

But most don’t — and honestly, we’re not sure daily automated patching is always the right call. Pushing updates every day introduces problems: bad drivers, dropped printers, broken software. We recommend quarterly checkups for most businesses, not automated daily changes.

Everything we do outside of backups is time and materials at $129/hr. Need updates done? We come in, do the work, and bill you for the time. Monthly, quarterly, whenever fits your business. When something breaks, you call us.

Backups are the exception to that model. Everything else — your call.

What We Back Up

Windows servers, Windows workstations, and Macs. Local backup, cloud backup, or both.

Getting started takes less than an hour. Download the agent from bondbyte.com/managed-backups, install it, fill out the registration form, and set your schedule. Mac users — your install code is on the page.

Pricing

Example: 1 server + 3 workstations + 500 GB cloud storage = $186/mo. No setup fees. No contracts. Cancel anytime.

Your Data Is Either Backed Up or It Isn’t

Do the math on your own business. How much work do you make in a day? How far back would actually hurt?

If that number makes you uncomfortable, let’s fix it.

Get started at bondbyte.com/managed-backups → Or call directly: 509.949.2162