A Practical Backup Checklist
For Small Businesses

The 15-minute backup check

Ask these before relying on your current setup.

1. Critical data

• Do you know which files the business cannot afford to lose?
• Are customer records, estimates, invoices, tax files, photos, scans, and signed documents included?
• Are QuickBooks company files, exports, receipts, payroll forms, and accountant folders included?
• Are files on owner laptops, staff computers, shared folders, and cloud drives all accounted for?

2. Separate copies

• Is there a backup outside the computer used every day?
• Is there a copy outside the same cloud-sync account?
• Are backup drives disconnected or otherwise protected from normal user access?
• Are old versions retained long enough to recover from delayed discovery?

3. Monitoring

• Does someone know whether backups finished successfully, and are failures reviewed?
• Is backup health checked at least monthly?
• Are backup settings documented somewhere more durable than memory?

4. Security

• Are backups encrypted and access limited to the people who need it?
• Are backup passwords or recovery keys stored securely?
• Would a compromised workstation easily reach and damage the backup copy?

5. Restore testing

• Has anyone restored a sample file, and a whole folder, recently?
• Can the business choose the date or version to restore, and do restored files open correctly?
• Does someone know how long recovery might take?

6. Recovery ownership

• Who starts recovery if a computer fails, and who decides which files are restored first?
• Who has access if the owner, bookkeeper, or office manager is unavailable?
• Who communicates with staff or clients during downtime?

Red flags

Signs the business may need a backup review:

• “Everything is in OneDrive, so we are covered.”
• “The external drive is always plugged into the computer.”
• “We have never tried restoring.”
• “Only one person knows where QuickBooks files live.”
• “We think backups run automatically, but nobody checks.”
• “The backup is on the same machine as the working files.”
• “We only think about backup when a computer is already failing.”

What to do with the answers

If the checklist exposes gaps, the next step is not to buy random storage, it is to document which data matters, where it lives, what protects it, what is missing, how restore would happen, and who owns recovery. Everyday Backups can use that to recommend a practical setup with monitoring and recovery support instead of guesswork.