Why Offsite Backups Matter for Small Businesses
A backup that lives next to the computer it's protecting isn't really a backup — it fails for the same reasons the original does: theft, fire, power damage, or ransomware that encrypts everything it can reach, including a drive plugged into the same machine.
What offsite actually protects against
- Theft: a stolen laptop doesn't take a separately-stored copy with it
- Hardware failure: a failed drive doesn't affect a copy stored elsewhere
- Fire or power damage: a single-location incident can't reach an offsite copy
- Ransomware: malware that encrypts local and attached drives can't reach a properly isolated offsite copy
What to back up first
Accounting data, customer records, supplier documents, quotes, invoices, operational files and shared folders — anything the business genuinely couldn't recreate from scratch.
A backup you haven't tested is a guess, not a plan
The only way to know a backup actually works is to restore from it. Versioning (keeping several points in time, not just the latest copy) also matters for ransomware recovery — if the only backup you have is from after the infection, it's already compromised.
Gigahost's hosting and VPS plans include daily off-server backup via UrBackup as standard, restore-tested on real production data — see Web Hosting. For your own PCs and servers, see Offsite Backups.