This is the longest session in the book, for the plain reason that it has to work on the worst day your practice will ever have. Nine entries cover workstations, servers, virtual guests, both mail platforms, the directory, the books, and the verification that turns all of it from an assumption into a dated result.
Recovery planning normally begins at the servers and stops there, a habit left over from when servers held everything. In a working practice today the material worth having back is scattered across a mail tenant, a document platform, a ledger nobody keeps locally, and the one laptop where somebody was halfway through a client's return.
The nine entries are laid out to be chosen against that reality rather than against an architecture diagram. Take whichever ones match where your work genuinely sits and leave the rest alone. Every entry declares the unit it tallies, so no quantity has to be guessed at.
Every backup product announces success. Success there means the job executed, which is a different statement from the copy being usable. The distance between those two is where practices discover, on the day it counts, that what they had been paying for was a schedule.
Restore verification performs the return to a schedule against a protected system and reports a dated pass or failure. Failures reach an engineer before they reach you. That result is also the most useful artifact this whole book produces, being evidence of an outcome rather than evidence of an intention.
Billing hands over every figure below at page load. Present while you read; a quantity stands until you alter it.
Version history over documents somebody is still inside. It answers the ordinary disaster instead of the dramatic one: the return written over, the file replaced by the wrong copy.
| Settles on | N-able Cove, protecting files and directories |
|---|---|
| Nets | One Windows workstation, document versions and nothing else |
| Value date | Opening copy completes, then only changes travel |
| Cleared by | Job outcomes are read by Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | One job outcome per workstation, daily |
The machine copied whole, so a dead disk costs one morning instead of a fortnight of reconstruction. It carries what a file copy omits: the operating system and everything installed onto it.
| Settles on | N-able Cove, image level protection |
|---|---|
| Nets | One workstation, taken as a complete disk |
| Value date | Opening image completes, then only changes travel |
| Cleared by | Job outcomes are read by Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | One job outcome per workstation, daily |
Bare metal servers copied with their databases handled correctly rather than caught mid write. The entry for the box your practice management system runs on, and for the file server everybody leans against.
| Settles on | N-able Cove, server image protection |
|---|---|
| Nets | One physical server, its disks and its databases |
| Value date | Opening image completes, then only changes travel |
| Cleared by | Job outcomes are read by Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | One job outcome per server, daily |
Guests protected individually, so a recovery hands back one machine rather than the entire host. Tallied guest by guest, a figure anybody can go and verify.
| Settles on | N-able Cove, virtual guest protection |
|---|---|
| Nets | One virtual server, its disks and its databases |
| Value date | Opening image completes, then only changes travel |
| Cleared by | Job outcomes are read by Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | One job outcome per guest, daily |
Microsoft keeps the platform available. Keeping your own mail, files, and sites after somebody in the office deletes them is an entirely separate job, and this entry is the one doing it.
| Settles on | N-able Cove, joined to the Microsoft tenant |
|---|---|
| Nets | One licensed user, mail and files on a single unit |
| Value date | Opening copy runs once the tenant grant is accepted |
| Cleared by | Job outcomes are read by Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | A dated copy record for each user |
The same argument, made on the other platform. Mail, drive material, calendars, and contacts copied for each licensed user and returnable one item at a time.
| Settles on | Dropsuite, joined to the Google tenant |
|---|---|
| Nets | One licensed user, mail and drive on a single unit |
| Value date | Opening copy runs once the tenant grant is accepted |
| Cleared by | Job outcomes are read by Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | A dated copy record for each user |
The ledger is the single record a practice cannot reconstruct from memory. This entry holds a continuous copy of the QuickBooks Online company and returns whatever a careless import wrote over.
| Settles on | Dropsuite, attached to QuickBooks Online |
|---|---|
| Nets | One company file, its records and its lists |
| Value date | Opens at the first successful connection |
| Cleared by | Job outcomes are read by Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | A dated copy record per company file |
Directory configuration is fast to change and hard to recall. Groups, roles, policies, and application grants are captured, so an edit made in haste can be read back and put right.
| Settles on | Dropsuite, reading your Entra ID directory |
|---|---|
| Nets | One tenant, directory configuration alone |
| Value date | Opening capture runs at the first connection |
| Cleared by | Capture outcomes are read by Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | A change history you can set against a date |
A copy nobody has ever returned from is a claim. This entry performs the return to a schedule and reports a dated result, which converts the claim into something a person can put a name beside.
| Settles on | N-able Cove, recovery testing over a protected system |
|---|---|
| Nets | One protected system, tested rather than presumed |
| Value date | Opening verification follows the opening copy |
| Cleared by | A failed test goes to Fortify 24x7 engineers |
| Reconciled by | A dated pass or failure for every system tested |
Nine entries, with the following limits applying across all of them.
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