Ask a team whether they have backups and the answer is almost always yes. Ask when one was last restored and the room goes quiet. That silence is the whole subject of data backup for small businesses.
The failure modes are dull and common
The backup contains nothing useful. A dump that ran while the database was locked, or a script whose error output went to a log nobody reads, producing a file of a plausible size and no content.
It cannot be restored where you need it. Different database version, missing extensions, no credentials to hand. All discoverable in ten minutes on a normal day, all discovered at the worst possible moment instead.
It takes far longer than anyone assumed. "We have backups" implies minutes. A large database restored across a network can take hours, and the difference matters enormously to the sentence you say to customers.
Everything is backed up except the one thing. Uploaded files, secrets, the configuration of the machine itself. The database survives and the product still cannot run.
Data backup for small business: the fix is one afternoon
Restore a backup into a scratch environment. Time it. Check the data is actually there — not that the file exists, but that yesterday's orders are in it. Write down the number and the steps.
You now have something you did not have that morning: a sentence with a number in it. "We can be back in forty minutes, having lost at most an hour of data." That is an operational fact, and it is worth vastly more than a folder of dumps.
Then decide if the number is acceptable
It might not be. Forty minutes of downtime and an hour of lost orders may be fine for one business and unacceptable for another. Knowing the number lets you decide whether to spend money improving it — more frequent snapshots, replication, a warm standby. Not knowing it means you have decided by accident.
We perform a restore during every setup, in front of the client, because it is the single cheapest thing in this trade that converts a hope into a fact. Occasionally it does not work. That is the most valuable afternoon of the whole engagement. A tested restore is part of every handover we do, and of what you keep when the work ends.
If you have not read it yet: what a support retainer should include, and when not to buy one.