Welcome to the Bixi podcast, on profitable business technology for small and medium businesses. I'm Geoff Tollefson.

Disaster recovery is the number one thing to be sure is available.

For every system in your business, ask one question. What happens if that stops?

The "what happens" quickly tells you your priorities.

Let's try it. Your accounting system stops. Can you still invoice? Pay suppliers? Pay staff this week?

Email stops. Can customers still reach you?

The server, the point of sale, the payroll file. Go through each one. Some can be down for a week and nobody notices. Some stop the whole business by lunchtime. Those are the ones you protect first.

A backup is a copy of your data, kept somewhere other than the original. Most businesses get it wrong in one of three ways.

One. They assume the cloud backs everything up. Usually, it doesn't. Microsoft three sixty five, Google, and most online apps keep the service running. They don't promise to bring back the file someone deleted three months ago, or a mailbox locked up by ransomware.

Two. The only backup sits right next to what it's protecting. A USB drive plugged into the server is lost in the same fire, theft, or attack.

Three, and this is the big one. Nobody has ever tested a restore. A backup you've never restored from is just a hope.

The rule to remember is three, two, one. Keep three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one offsite. And make sure at least one copy can't be changed or deleted, even by an administrator. That's your insurance against ransomware.

Backups are the ingredients. A disaster recovery plan is the recipe.

Who decides we're in a disaster? Which systems come back first? Your "what happens if that stops" list already answers that. Where are the logins, the supplier numbers, the I T contact? And how much work can you afford to redo? An hour? A day? A week? If losing a day of invoices would really hurt, a nightly backup isn't enough.

Print the plan. If your systems are down, the P D F on your server won't help.

So, three things this week.

One. List your systems, and ask "what happens if that stops?" for each.

Two. Restore one important file from backup, and time how long it takes.

Three. Write a one page recovery plan. Who, what order, which phone numbers.

Disasters rarely give notice. The businesses that bounce back are the ones that did the boring work first.

If you'd like an independent second set of eyes on your systems, not tied to any software vendor, that's what our Business Systems Review is for. Book a free twenty minute call at bixi dot com dot au.

Thanks for listening. I'm Geoff, and this has been the Bixi podcast.