Backups verified every day, not just scheduled and hoped for.
Almost every business that has lost data had backups running at the time. What they did not have was proof those backups worked. A job can report success every night and still be writing files that will not open, and you find out on the one day you cannot afford to.
We verify instead of assuming. Every backup MJN manages is checked daily with screenshot proof that the system boots and the data is readable. You do not have to take our word for it, and neither do we.
Data loss rarely announces itself. It arrives as a failed drive, a folder someone deleted on a Friday afternoon, a ransomware note, or an employee who left and took a mailbox with them. We plan for all four, across your servers, workstations and cloud accounts, wherever your team is working.
Every backup is checked with screenshot verification, so there is visual evidence your systems can be restored rather than a log entry claiming they can. When a backup fails, we know that morning, not during the emergency.
A copy sitting on the same network as the original is not a backup. Your data is replicated offsite, away from the fire, the flood, the theft and the ransomware that reached your server in the first place.
Keeping copies is the easy part. We document what gets restored first, who makes that call and roughly how long each step takes, then we test the plan before the day you need it.
Five things we put in place for every Long Island business whose data we protect.
Proof your data can come back, checked every single day.
Most backup software tells you whether a job finished. That is not the same as telling you whether the result is usable. A job can complete cleanly while quietly skipping a locked database file, and nothing in the report will mention it. The failure only surfaces when someone tries to restore, which is always the worst moment to learn something new about your backups.
We use screenshot verification instead. Each protected system is booted from its backup and photographed, so there is a dated image showing the machine coming up and the data intact. If that image does not appear, our team is investigating it the same morning rather than waiting for you to discover the problem.
A backup on the same network is not a backup.
Ransomware crews have learned to hunt backups first. Before encrypting anything they look for the backup server, the mapped drive and the NAS in the closet, and they destroy those copies so you have no choice but to pay. A local backup alone hands them everything in one place.
Your data is replicated to offsite storage that an attacker on your network cannot reach or overwrite. That protects you from the deliberate attack and from the ordinary disasters too: the burst pipe above the server closet, the break-in, the fire that takes the building and everything humming inside it.
The goal is to make paying unnecessary.
Every ransomware demand is really a bet that your backups will not save you. Attackers price it that way deliberately, landing just below what a week of downtime would cost, so paying starts to feel like the sensible business decision. Clean, verified, offsite backups take that leverage away.
Recovery is a sequence, not a button. We identify how far back your clean restore point sits, rebuild systems in priority order so the parts of the business that earn money come back first, and confirm the intrusion is closed before anything is reconnected. Restoring onto a network the attacker still has access to only starts the clock again.
Microsoft keeps their service running. Your data is your job.
This is the assumption that catches the most businesses out. Microsoft and Google guarantee their platforms stay available. Neither one guarantees that the mailbox someone purged, the SharePoint library a departing employee wiped, or the OneDrive folder ransomware reached through a synced laptop will still be there next month. Retention windows are shorter than most owners expect, and once they close the data is gone.
We back your cloud accounts up separately, on their own schedule, in storage that is not controlled by the same login that could delete the original. Mail, calendars, contacts, Teams content, SharePoint and OneDrive files can then be restored individually, so recovering one deleted folder does not mean rolling an entire tenant backwards.
Untested plans are documents, not plans.
Two questions decide how bad a bad day gets. How much work can you afford to lose, and how long can you afford to be down? Answer those honestly for each system and the shape of the plan follows: the accounting server that stops invoicing needs a tighter target than the file share holding photographs from 2014.
So we write it down and then we rehearse it. Who declares an incident, which systems come back in what order, where the offline copy of the plan lives when email is unavailable, and who calls your insurer. Testing is what turns those answers from optimistic guesses into numbers you can actually rely on.
What Long Island business owners ask before they trust someone with their data.
Because you can see them working. Screenshot verification boots each protected system from its backup and captures a dated image of it running. A useful test: ask whoever handles your IT for yesterday's proof. If what comes back is a job log rather than evidence a restore succeeded, you do not have verified backups. You have scheduled ones.
No, and it is the most expensive misunderstanding we run into. Microsoft protects the availability of the service, not the contents of your tenant. Purged mail, a SharePoint library a departing employee wiped, or ransomware that reached OneDrive through a synced laptop are all your responsibility, and native retention windows close sooner than most owners expect. Microsoft 365 needs its own separate backup.
It depends on how much data you hold, which systems have to come back first, and whether the attacker still has a way in. We set those targets with you up front and test against them, so the answer is a measured number from your own environment. Treat any provider who quotes a recovery time before seeing your systems with suspicion, because that number is invented.
Further back than most businesses keep, and for a specific reason. Ransomware frequently sits dormant for weeks before it triggers, so if you only retain a few days of history, every copy you hold may already be compromised. We set retention against how far back you might genuinely need to reach and any rules your industry imposes, then revisit it as those change.
All of Nassau and Suffolk County. We support businesses in Melville, Farmingdale, Garden City, Mineola, Plainview, Huntington, Deer Park, Bellmore and our home base of Wantagh. Backup and recovery work is handled remotely by our US-based team, so how quickly we respond never depends on drive time.