Backup and Disaster Recovery for Sydney Businesses
Most Sydney businesses think they have a backup. Most are wrong. Tapes that haven’t been tested in years, Microsoft 365 with no third-party backup, and NAS units sitting in the same building as the servers they’re backing up. 4iT designs and manages backup solutions that actually work when you need them: tested, offsite, and immutable against ransomware.
Sydney MSP
Greater Sydney, NSW
- Microsoft Partner
- Sophos Partner
- Ubiquiti Partner
Hourly
snapshot frequency for on-site server and VM backups
Nightly
offsite replication to Australian data centres
Quarterly
recovery testing for all managed backup clients
What Backup Solution Does 4iT Use for Sydney SMEs?
For on-premise servers and virtual machines, we use Veeam Backup and Replication, the industry standard for VM and physical backup. For environments running on Proxmox, our preferred virtualisation platform for SME on-premise servers, we use Proxmox Backup Server with immutable backup repositories. Both produce verified, restorable backups with hourly snapshot frequency.
For Microsoft 365 data including Exchange Online mailboxes, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, we use a third-party backup tool that captures data independently of Microsoft. Microsoft’s own recycle bins and version history are not a substitute for backup.
Why Is Immutable Backup Critical for Sydney Businesses?
Ransomware attackers know your backup exists. Modern ransomware strains spend days inside your network before encrypting data, specifically to find and delete or encrypt backups first. Immutable backups use object-lock technology: once written, the backup data cannot be modified or deleted for a set retention period, even by an administrator account.
4iT stores immutable backups in Australian data centres in Sydney or Melbourne to keep data onshore for Privacy Act 1988 compliance. We maintain one local copy for fast recovery and one immutable offsite copy. That’s the 3-2-1 backup rule in practice, not just on paper.
How Quickly Can a Sydney Business Recover from a Disaster?
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are the two numbers that matter. RTO is how long recovery takes. RPO is how much data you can afford to lose. For most 4iT-managed SMEs, RTO is under four hours for a full server failure and under 30 minutes for a single virtual machine.
For Microsoft 365 data, individual email and file recovery takes minutes. A full mailbox restore is typically under an hour. We document and test these figures during quarterly backup reviews. You receive evidence of a successful test restore, not just a green light on a dashboard.
Does Microsoft 365 Need a Third-Party Backup?
Yes. Microsoft’s recycle bins and version history protect against accidental deletion for 30 to 93 days depending on the feature, but they don’t protect against malicious deletion by a compromised admin account, data corruption, or loss when a licence lapses and the account is removed.
The Australian Signals Directorate’s Essential Eight requires daily backups of important data stored disconnected from the network. A third-party Microsoft 365 backup satisfies this control for cloud-hosted data and provides the audit trail that cyber insurers increasingly require.
Frequently Asked Questions
Managed backup for a 10-server environment with offsite replication typically starts at AU$300-600 per month, including storage, monitoring, and quarterly recovery testing. Microsoft 365 backup adds AU$4-8 per user per month depending on the tool and retention period required.
Yes. All 4iT-managed backup storage uses Australian data centres. Data does not leave Australia. This is a deliberate choice for Privacy Act 1988 compliance and to ensure Australian sovereignty over your business data.
We provide monthly backup reports showing job success rates and backup sizes. Every quarter we run an actual recovery test, restoring a virtual machine or a set of files to a test environment, and send you documented evidence of a successful restore.
Three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one copy stored offsite. The ACSC recommends it for all Australian businesses. 4iT implements this as a local Proxmox or NAS backup plus encrypted replication to an Australian cloud data centre using immutable object storage.
Ready to Talk to a Sydney IT Specialist?
4iT Support covers SMEs across Greater Sydney including the Hills District, North Shore, Parramatta, and the CBD. No lock-in contracts. Straight answers.