Backup and Disaster Recovery Services in Toronto, North York and the GTA

Five pieces of work, run continuously rather than set up once. Automated backups of servers, workstations where needed, and Microsoft 365 mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams data, which Microsoft does not keep indefinitely on your behalf. A local copy for fast restores and a cloud copy kept separate from the production network, so an attacker who takes over the office network cannot reach or delete it.

Daily monitoring of backup jobs, with failures investigated rather than left in an inbox. Scheduled test restores, recorded with the date and what was restored, because an untested backup is an assumption. And a written recovery plan that sets the restore order, the recovery targets your business agreed to, and who is called. When something goes wrong, the team works from that plan.

Disaster recovery brings the technology back. Business continuity is the wider plan for how the business keeps working while it comes back: who can work from home on Microsoft 365 if the office is closed, how phones are redirected, which suppliers and clients are told, and which manual workarounds keep orders, payroll or appointments moving for a day or two. IT continuity services connect the two, so the IT recovery order matches the order the business actually needs.

In practice we work through it with the owner or office manager rather than handing over a template. We list the processes that cannot stop, the systems and people each one depends on, and the realistic disruptions for an office in Toronto or North York: a server failure, ransomware on a shared drive, a building closure, an internet outage or a key person being unavailable. The result is a short document with contacts, decisions already made and the steps for each scenario, reviewed when the business or its systems change.

Recovery time objective (RTO) is how long a system can be down before the damage becomes serious. Recovery point objective (RPO) is how much recent work you can afford to lose, measured in time: if the last good copy is from last night, everything done today is gone. Each important system gets its own two numbers, chosen by the business, and those numbers decide how often it is backed up and how recovery is designed. A file share that changes all day needs a shorter RPO than an archive that changes once a month.

Testing is how you find out whether those targets are realistic. We restore files, mailboxes and, where the design allows, whole systems into an isolated location so staff are not disrupted, then record what was restored, how long it took and anything that did not work. When a test shows the agreed target cannot be met with the current setup, you get a written explanation of the gap and the options for closing it, and the decision stays with you.

Many businesses already pay for a backup product and assume that is disaster recovery. The difference shows up on the bad day. Questions worth asking any provider: Is there a copy the office network cannot reach or delete? Who reads the backup reports, and what happens when a job fails? When was the last test restore, and is there a written record of it? Is Microsoft 365 data backed up separately? Does a written plan say what is restored first and who makes the calls?

If the honest answer to most of those is no, the business has copies of data but no tested way back. That is the gap IT disaster recovery services are meant to close, and it is usually cheaper to close it before an incident than during one. Our managed security services work alongside backup and recovery, because ransomware recovery depends on both stopping the attacker and restoring clean data.

Backup monitoring, test restores and most recovery work are done remotely, so the service is the same for an office downtown, in North York or in Vaughan. When recovery needs hands on hardware, such as replacing a failed server or bringing a site back after a flood or power event, a technician is dispatched from our office at 7810 Keele Street in Vaughan, just north of Toronto in York Region.

Local pages describe how support works in each area: IT support in North York, IT support in York Region and IT support in Toronto. Businesses outside the GTA are supported remotely, and any on-site requirement is raised during scoping.

It starts with what you already have. We list the systems the business depends on, where the data lives, what is currently backed up, how often, and when anyone last restored from it. That review regularly finds gaps such as a server nobody included, Microsoft 365 data with no separate backup, or a backup that has been failing quietly for months.

Next, you decide two numbers for each important system: how much recent data you can afford to lose and how long you can afford to be down. Those are business decisions, and they set the backup frequency and the design. We then deploy or correct the backups, run a first test restore, and write the recovery plan with you. If you want to start with the planning side yourself, our disaster recovery plan guide for small businesses in Ontario walks through the steps.

For businesses on a managed IT agreement, monitored backup and recovery planning are part of the monthly fee. The fee depends on how many users, devices and servers are covered, how much data is protected and how many sites are involved, so we give a written figure after a short conversation about what you run. The structure of the plan tiers is on our managed IT plans page.

One-off work for businesses not on an agreement, such as reviewing an existing plan, running a restore test or recovering from a failure, is billed by the hour and scoped in writing first. Cloud storage and backup software licences depend on the volume of data and are set out separately in the quote.

Start with evidence rather than a sales conversation. Our IT risk self-check covers fifteen control areas and ranks your gaps by weight, so you can see which gap to fix first. There is no sign-up: it is a printable checklist.

If email is anywhere in scope, run the email spoofing check against your domain first. It reads your published SPF, DKIM and DMARC records and tells you whether your domain can be spoofed to your own clients. In our August 2026 study of 481 GTA business domains, only 20.6% enforced DMARC, and the earlier July 2026 pilot (118 GTA domains) found only 40% fully protected against spoofing. The follow-up work is published as our GTA small-business cybersecurity report and a scan of what 470 GTA business websites disclose about their own security.

Comparing us against another provider is fair and we would rather you did it properly. Our managed IT quote checker scores any written proposal against 22 items, and an IT Health Check gets you a written summary of what we find, whoever you end up choosing.

Practical guides from our team on the decisions behind this service.

Onboarding steps, what a managed agreement covers and the privacy frameworks we help with are set out once on our managed IT plans page. Work outside an agreement is scoped and quoted in writing first.