Why most small firms get backup wrong
We see a shocking 63% of UK businesses lose critical data each year, yet only a fraction have a tested restore plan. The numbers change the conversation – it isn’t "if" you need a backup, it’s "when" and "how quickly" you can get back online.
What are the realistic backup options?
We usually narrow the field to four practical routes:
- External USB hard drive – plug‑and‑play, 1–5 TB drives from £50 to £120.
- Network‑attached storage (NAS) – a small rack you mount in the office, £200‑£600 for the box plus £100‑£150 per 4 TB drive.
- Cloud backup services – monthly fees of £5‑£15 per TB, e.g. Backblaze B2, Microsoft 365 backup, or Google Workspace.
- Hybrid (local + cloud) – combine a NAS with an automated cloud sync.
How do they stack up on price, speed and safety?
We ran the numbers on a typical 10‑user office with 5 TB of active data.
- External drive: upfront £100, no recurring cost. Recovery is as fast as the USB 3.0 link (about 100 MB/s). But if ransomware encrypts the drive, you lose everything – it’s a single point of failure.
- NAS: £500 for hardware and two 4 TB drives (RAID‑1 mirrors). Ongoing power ~£10/month. Restores over gigabit Ethernet hit ~120 MB/s, and RAID protects against a single drive death. You still need an off‑site copy for fire or theft.
- Cloud only: £75‑£150 per month for 5 TB, no hardware to manage. Recovery depends on internet speed – a 50 Mbps line pulls ~6 MB/s, meaning a full restore can take many hours. However, the data sits in a separate data centre, immune to on‑premises ransomware.
- Hybrid: Same NAS cost plus a cloud tier of 2 TB for £10‑£20/month. You get instant local restores for day‑to‑day loss and a secure off‑site copy for catastrophic events.
What about management effort?
We hear most owners complain about "set‑it‑and‑forget‑it". An external drive needs manual rotation every few weeks – easy to forget. A NAS can be scheduled to snapshot every night; most models have a web UI that we can configure while we’re on a call. Cloud services usually have an agent that runs in the background, but you must watch the storage quota.
Our firm recommendation
For the majority of SMEs we’d recommend the hybrid approach – a modest NAS for daily restores paired with a cheap cloud tier for disaster protection. It balances cost (about £600 upfront plus £15/month), speed (local restores in minutes), and resilience (off‑site copy protects against fire, theft or ransomware). We can set up the NAS, schedule the sync to cloud & Microsoft 365 and test the restore process as part of our business IT support package.
If you already have a NAS, adding a cloud backup costs as little as £10 a month – a small price for peace of mind. If you’re on a shoestring, start with a good external drive but plan to migrate to hybrid within 6‑12 months.
We also advise a yearly data recovery check – we’ll try to retrieve a test file from your backup to confirm the chain works before you actually need it.
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