Most Ghaziabad offices that ask about backup have a Google Drive folder with forty files and a hard disk four years old. Neither is a plan. Here is what the 3-2-1 rule looks like in a small office.
Start with an inventory, not a product
Walk the floor and note where data really lives:
- The accountant’s Tally or Busy data file. It usually sits under Program Files, not in Documents, and it is the most-missed item on the list.
- Customer records in a locally-installed billing or CRM tool, which are not in your cloud subscription.
- Shared files on a mapped drive, or a NAS installed two years ago and never checked.
- CCTV footage, if the NVR writes to its own disk. That disk is usually full and overwriting.
The filter: anything you cannot recreate from a phone call to a customer is in scope. Anything rebuildable in a day is not worth budget.
Three gaps most offices miss
WhatsApp Business. For a trading firm this is the order book, customer list, catalogue, price list and payment confirmations, and none of it lives on a server. The chats are on one phone, the profile is tied to a Meta Business account, and the two-step PIN is in the owner’s head. If the phone is lost or the number is ported, the catalogue and order history are gone and customers get messages from a number they have blocked. Fix: keep the catalogue and price list in a shared cloud folder, store the two-step PIN in the office safe with the KYC papers, and give the Meta Business account MFA plus a second administrator.
The credential list. Staff and customer numbers, the domain registrar login, GST portal credentials, the bank signatory details and the domain itself are all data. One spreadsheet holding all of that on a laptop ends with the laptop.
The backup administrator. Backup tooling that authenticates with the same admin password used for daily work is one stolen password from being deleted. Give it its own service account.
Frequency by data class
| Data | Acceptable loss | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Accounting company file, GST working | One day of entries | Twice daily |
| Customer, CRM and billing database | An hour of new orders | Every 1 to 4 hours |
| Quotes, contracts, drawings | One working day | Nightly |
| Email and shared documents | One day | Continuous sync, local copy nightly |
Decide the acceptable-loss column first. If a day of accounting entries is tolerable, a nightly file backup is enough.
Offsite, and the ransomware problem
Offsite has to mean a different physical place, and a NAS in the same rack does not qualify. Use a cloud account with a password that is not your email password, or a disk kept at home.
Ransomware actively hunts backups. If the target is a network share, encryption reaches it, and if the backup credentials sit on a workstation, so does the deletion. Close that with versioned retention, a backup account no ordinary user can write to, and one copy workstations cannot reach.
Test a restore, not a backup
A backup job reporting success only proves software wrote a file. It is the step most offices never do.
- Pick a file at random from a folder you did not choose, and open it.
- Restore a folder of 200 files to a new location and count what arrived.
- Restore the accounting company file to a scratch folder and open it in Tally.
- Time each one. A restore that takes 40 minutes at 9pm becomes four hours during office hours.
Record the date, what you restored, the duration and anything wrong in a shared note. If step 3 needs one person every time, train a second.
What it costs, and when a NAS is overkill
| Item | Range |
|---|---|
| Four-bay NAS with two 4TB drives | ₹25,000 - 45,000 |
| Additional 4TB drive | ₹2,500 - 4,500 |
| Cloud storage, 10 to 20 users | ₹700 - 3,000 per month |
| Setup, configuration, documentation | ₹5,000 - 20,000 |
| Monthly monitoring under an AMC | ₹2,000 - 8,000 |
The monitoring line matters most, because an unmonitored backup fails silently.
If you are five people, everything already lives in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and nobody keeps local-only files, you may not need a NAS. Versioned cloud sync plus a separate snapshot service is a legitimate 3-2-1 for far less.
FAQ
How often should we back up? Set the acceptable loss first, then match it. Nightly for documents, every one to four hours for the billing database, where lost hours cost money.
Is one cloud copy enough? No. It is one copy, and cloud sync mirrors deletions rather than protecting from them. You need a local copy plus versioned retention elsewhere.
Should staff be able to delete backed-up files? They should not be able to delete the backup itself. Use a service account for backup writes, and let one named person change retention.
Our files are already in Google Drive, so that is a backup? It is a sync. A hijacked account can delete everything at once, and the deletion syncs everywhere. Add a copy with its own credentials.
What about WhatsApp history? Export it periodically, and at minimum keep the catalogue, price list and business profile outside the phone.
Get the drill running, not just the tool
24Bit System sets up backup and disaster recovery for Ghaziabad offices, and monitoring can sit under a monthly IT AMC. If something is already lost, that is data recovery. The general strategy is in data backup best practices. Call +91 7840002466 or contact us.
