Backup Solutions

Backup & Recovery

Backup is only worth what you can restore.

We design and manage backup on three platforms — Veeam, Acronis and ExaGrid — get a copy off site to Azure or tape, and then prove the restores actually work. Which combination you need depends on what you already have to back up to, and how hard your data has to be to destroy.

See which platform fits

Veeam Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud ExaGrid Azure Blob Tape / LTO Vendor-certified engineers

Three platforms, three different jobs

Start from what you already have.

Most backup projects go wrong at the first decision, not the last. These three are not competing products — they answer different questions, and plenty of our customers run two of them together.

Backup software

Veeam

Image-based backup and replication for virtual, physical and cloud workloads, with granular recovery down to a single file or mailbox item.

Choose this when you have servers and storage of your own, and want full control of where backups live and how fast you can recover.

VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV
Physical servers, endpoints, NAS
Microsoft 365 and Entra ID
Replication for disaster recovery
Off-site copies to Azure Blob or tape

Veeam backup solutions →

Cloud backup

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud

Backup straight to secure cloud storage, with no backup server to buy, house or maintain — managed from a single console.

Choose this when you are an SME with no backup server, one small server room, or staff and laptops spread across sites.

No on-premises backup hardware needed
Servers, workstations and laptops
Microsoft 365 mail, OneDrive, SharePoint
Anti-malware built into the agent

Acronis cloud backup →

Backup storage

ExaGrid

A purpose-built backup storage target with deduplication, and a retention tier that is not exposed to the network — so ransomware cannot reach your recovery point.

Choose this when backups already run but the copies themselves are the weak link, or backup windows and storage growth have stopped being manageable.

Works behind Veeam and other backup software
Deduplication to cut stored capacity
Non-network-facing retention tier
Scales by adding appliances, not replacing them

ExaGrid backup storage →

Straight comparison

If you only read one thing on this page.

Your situation	What we would put in	Why
No backup server, and no room for one	Acronis	Agents back up direct to cloud storage. Nothing to rack, nothing to maintain on site.
Virtualised servers on site, own storage	Veeam	Image-based backups and fast full-VM restores, with backup copies you control.
Backups run, but ransomware is the worry	Veeam ExaGrid	Veeam writes to an ExaGrid retention tier that is not reachable from the network.
Backup window overruns into the working day	ExaGrid	Data lands on a disk-cache tier first, so ingest is not throttled by deduplication.
Head office plus branches, mixed estate	Veeam Acronis	Veeam for the datacentre, Acronis for branch machines and roaming laptops.
Microsoft 365 only, no servers at all	Acronis	Mail, OneDrive and SharePoint retained independently of Microsoft's own retention.
Need a copy off site, but only have one site	Veeam Azure Blob	Older restore points tier out to Azure automatically — off site without a second building.
Years of retention for audit or regulators	Veeam Tape	Cheap per terabyte over long periods, and a tape out of the drive is genuinely offline.

Getting a copy off the premises

A backup in the same building as the data is one fire away from useless.

Which platform you back up with is a separate question from where the second and third copies go. Veeam writes to all three of the targets below, and we normally combine two of them.

3–2–1 Three copies of your data, on two kinds of media, with one kept off site. It is an old rule and it still holds — ransomware simply added a corollary, that at least one copy should be impossible to alter from a compromised network.

On site, isolated

ExaGrid retention tier

Fast local restores, with the retention tier held behind the appliance rather than presented to the network, so it is not reachable from a compromised server.

Best for fast recovery of whole servers, and surviving a network-wide compromise.

Cloud

Azure Blob storage

Veeam tiers older restore points out to Azure Blob automatically — a genuinely off-site copy with no second building, no second rack and no tape to collect.

Best for off-site copies when you only have one site, and for long retention that would be expensive on local disk.

Offline

Tape (LTO)

Written on a schedule, then ejected. A tape out of the drive is genuinely offline — nothing on your network can reach it, encrypt it, or bill you monthly for it.

Best for multi-year retention, audit and regulatory copies, and anyone who wants a copy no attacker can touch.

Two ways to buy it

Implement it once, or hand us the running of it.

Backup fails quietly — a job that has not run for six weeks looks exactly like one that has, until the day you need it. Whether that watching is your job or ours is your call.

One-time project

Implementation

We start from how much data you can afford to lose and how long you can be down, size retention and schedules to match, prove a restore, document it, and hand it over. Yours to run afterwards, with us available for changes without a retainer.

Optional, ongoing

Managed service

Daily job monitoring with failures raised as tickets rather than emails nobody opens, scheduled restore testing that is documented, retention and capacity reviewed as data grows, and reporting in plain language.

GigaExtendYou have an IT team GigaManaged ITWe run all of IT

Managed backup and DR already sits inside GigaExtend, so on that plan this is not a separate purchase.

Free tool

Work out how much backup storage you need

Enter your data size, change rate and retention, and get a sizing estimate before you talk to anyone.

Open the calculator →

Questions we get asked

Backup questions, answered plainly.

Do I need backup if everything is already in Microsoft 365?

Yes. Microsoft protects its own infrastructure, not your content decisions. A mailbox deleted by a departing employee, a SharePoint library overwritten by a sync error, or a ransomware-encrypted OneDrive are all your responsibility, and Microsoft's default retention windows are shorter than most businesses assume.

What is the difference between backup and disaster recovery?

Backup is a copy you can restore from. Disaster recovery is how quickly you can be running again. You can have good backups and still be down for three days, which is why we start from your recovery time target rather than from a product.

Can ransomware encrypt our backups too?

If the backup storage is reachable from the network with normal credentials, then yes — and modern ransomware looks for it first. This is the specific problem ExaGrid's non-network-facing retention tier addresses, and why we pair it with Veeam for customers whose recovery has to survive a full compromise.

We are a small company. Is Veeam overkill?

Often, yes — if you have no backup server, buying one to run backup software is the wrong order of spending. That is exactly the case Acronis cloud backup covers, and it is where most of our SME customers start.

We only have one office. How do we get a copy off site?

Two practical routes, and they are not exclusive. Veeam can tier older restore points straight into Azure Blob storage, which gives you a genuine off-site copy with nothing extra on your premises. Or it can write to tape on a schedule, and an ejected tape is offline in a way no cloud copy is. Businesses with a compliance retention period often end up doing both — Azure for the recent weeks, tape for the years.

Is tape not obsolete?

For primary backup, largely yes — restoring a server from tape is slow. For long retention it is still hard to beat on cost per terabyte, and it has one property no online storage has: once the tape is out of the drive, nothing on your network can reach it. That is why we still deploy it alongside disk and cloud rather than instead of them.

Do you support backup we did not install?

Usually. If you already run Veeam or Acronis, we can take over monitoring, restore testing and reporting without rebuilding it. Where the existing design cannot meet your recovery target, we will tell you that before taking it on.

Where is our data stored?

On-premises backups stay in your own facility. For cloud backup we will confirm the storage region with you before deployment, which matters if you have contractual or regulatory constraints on where data may reside.

Find out whether your backups would survive a bad week.

We will review what you have now, test whether it restores, and tell you plainly where the gaps are — before recommending anything.

Contact our team