Most IT companies will tell you they back up your data. Almost all of them can show you a green checkmark. Very few can tell you, without looking it up, the last time they actually restored a file, a mailbox, or a server and proved it worked.

That gap is the whole problem. The checkmark means a job ran. It does not mean you can get the business back.

What you should be hearing from them

You should not be picking a folder once a month and trying a restore yourself. That is not a business owner’s job. It is the job you already pay an IT company to own.

A provider who is actually managing you can answer these without a pause:

  • When was the last restore test?
  • What did they restore: a mailbox, a share, a full server?
  • How long did it take?
  • What failed, and what did they change after?

If those answers are vague, you do not have a recovery plan. You have a backup product.

What we do We schedule restore tests, document the result, and fix the job when it skipped open files or aged out the one folder you would actually need. You get the confirmation. You do not run the drill.

The day it usually breaks

The office manager deletes a vendor invoice from Microsoft 365 and needs it for taxes. The backup ran every night. The restore comes back empty, or three weeks too old.

Or ransomware hits the file server. The backup drive is sitting right there. The restore fails because the job had been skipping locked files for months. Nobody was watching because nobody was testing.

Those are not surprises. They are what happens when “we have backups” is the entire conversation.

This is not a checklist for you

You should not be reading backup logs. You should not be comparing file sizes. You should not be writing a restore runbook on a Sunday.

Your IT company should already be:

  • Testing restores on a calendar, not after an emergency
  • Telling you how long a real recovery takes
  • Knowing which systems come back first so payroll and phones are not day three
  • Keeping a copy that is not sitting on the same server that just died

If they handed you a binder and walked away, they handed the risk back to you.

The question to ask them

Ask one thing: “When did you last restore our data, and what did you restore?”

A real answer has a date and a specific system. “We back everything up to the cloud” is not an answer.

If you want that question answered against your environment, reach out. We will tell you what is actually recoverable and what only looks like it is.