Backup, Recovery, and Tested Continuity

Contingency planning is the safeguard most often failed at the testing step.

The Security Rule devotes an entire standard to contingency planning, and it is unusually specific. It asks for a data backup plan, a disaster recovery plan, an emergency mode operation plan, procedures for periodic testing and revision, and an assessment of which applications and data are critical.

Most organizations can show the first. Many can describe the second and third. Very few can produce evidence of the fourth, because testing a restore is work somebody has to schedule, perform, and write up, and it competes with a waiting room full of people.

A second reason has nothing to do with regulation at all. Any backup an intruder can reach is destroyed before the encryption starts, since a practice able to prove a clean restore point has no reason to negotiate. A copy sitting on a network share behind the same credentials as the systems it covers was never a recovery plan. It is a second victim.

The four lines that protect computers.

The machine lines run on N-able Cove, which also carries the Microsoft 365 line further down and the restore testing at the end. One platform across workstations, servers, and the tenant means one storage pool, one console, and one set of restore mechanics to learn rather than three.

Practice File Protection covers working documents on Windows machines: office files, vector images, database files, and similar working material, captured twice a day, with any version from the last 28 days recoverable in seconds. It is the inexpensive line for the everyday case, which is a file somebody overwrote before lunch.

Full Workstation Recovery protects the whole machine on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with fully customizable selection and scheduling, an optional local copy alongside the cloud copy, and bare-metal recovery on Windows. It includes 500 GB of pooled storage.

Server Recovery and Virtual Server Recovery apply the same approach to physical and virtual servers, including native support for SQL, Oracle, MySQL, Exchange, and SharePoint, and each includes 2,000 GB of pooled storage. Recovery is granular down to a single file or complete to bare metal.

Pooled storage is worth understanding: the allowance is aggregated across the subscription rather than fixed per device, so a large server and a small one balance each other instead of requiring separate calculations.

The four lines that protect cloud tenancy.

Microsoft and Google guarantee that their platforms remain available. Retaining and recovering the contents is your side of the agreement, and it is the sentence most often discovered after a deletion rather than before one.

Two platforms divide these four lines. Cove extends its SaaS protection to Microsoft 365, which keeps the tenant on the same platform as your machines and servers. Dropsuite carries Google Workspace, QuickBooks Online, and the directory line. Either way these are API-level connectors rather than agents, so nothing is installed anywhere; you authorize a connection and the copying begins.

Microsoft 365 Retention, on Cove, reaches Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Mail is held for seven years; the other three for one. Shared mailboxes carry no charge, which matters more here than elsewhere, since referrals, statements, and prior authorizations tend to collect in exactly those addresses. Storage runs at one terabyte a head, pooled across the tenant.

Google Workspace Retention, on Dropsuite, reaches mail, personal and shared drives, and the contact, calendar, and task records beside them. Cadence differs by type: mail twelve times daily, drives three, the rest once. Recovery goes as fine as a single message. AES-256 applies throughout, with transport protected as well.

QuickBooks Online Retention, also Dropsuite, protects the accounting file continuously, with one-click restore and unlimited storage, priced per company. Intuit does not guarantee that your data is recoverable, which is the whole argument for this line.

Entra ID Configuration Recovery is the third Dropsuite line, protecting directory configuration with unlimited retention, well past the thirty-day window Microsoft provides natively. It monitors changes in real time against last-known-good values and rolls back unwanted changes in seconds. Directory objects and conditional access policy are the control plane sitting underneath every other cloud line here.

The line that turns a plan into a fact.

Tested Restore Evidence is the Cove recovery testing capability, running rehearsals against a weekly or monthly schedule and handing back evidence that the restore worked. It is priced per protected system and is the only line here that produces no protection of its own.

What it produces instead is the artifact. A dated report showing that a specific system was recovered successfully on a specific day is the difference between asserting a contingency plan exists and demonstrating that it works. It is also, bluntly, the cheapest way to discover that a job has been silently failing since March, which is a thing that happens to organizations that never test.

Apply it to the systems whose loss would stop care: the practice management server, the imaging store, the file server holding scanned records. Testing everything is possible and usually unnecessary.

How long things take, honestly.

• One file from version history: under a minute, and the most common request by a wide margin.
• A mailbox, a drive, or a company file: minutes, restored into the live tenant or exported out.
• A directory configuration rollback: seconds, against last-known-good values.
• A dead server rebuilt from bare metal onto fresh hardware: hours, set by how much data there is and how fast the link is. Hours you budgeted for beat hours you found out about, and the testing line is how the real figure gets known in advance.

What we keep sits well away from the estate it covers: separate platform, separate credentials, separate administrative boundary. An account taken over inside your environment can wreck a great deal of it. Nothing reaches across into material that was never stored there.