Most small businesses, asked whether they are backed up, will say yes, and most of them are partly right. The accounting is in a system that keeps its own copies. The email sits on a server somewhere. The photographs are on a phone that syncs. What tends to be missing is not a backup system but an inventory: a plain list of the things that exist in exactly one copy. And those things are rarely the ones anybody would nominate in advance. They are the signed contract in the folder on the shelf, the spreadsheet of prices that lives only on one laptop, the notebook with the measurements from every job, the certificate that took four months to obtain.
What makes these vulnerable is not their importance but their ordinariness. A business protects what it thinks of as its data - the system, the database, the accounts - and does not think of the shelf or the notebook as data at all. So the single copy survives for years, is used constantly, and is never questioned, because it has never yet been a problem. The events that destroy it are not dramatic either. A drive fails without warning. A drink goes over a keyboard. A van is broken into and the laptop bag goes with it. Water comes through a roof over a weekend. None of these is unusual, and all of them are indifferent to how important the contents were.
The useful exercise is short and can be done in one sitting, and it is an inventory rather than a project. Walk through the business and ask, of each thing you rely on, how many copies of this exist and where is the second one. Not whether it is important - importance is not the question and it leads to arguments. Simply: how many copies. The answer will be two or more for most things, which is why the exercise is quick, and it will be one for a small number of things, which is the entire output. That short list is what needed protecting all along, and most businesses have never seen it written down.
Fixing the list is usually easier than finding it was. A paper document can be photographed or scanned and the file kept somewhere other than the same building. A spreadsheet on one laptop can be moved to a storage service that keeps copies, or simply copied to a second place on a regular basis. A notebook can be photographed at the end of each week. None of this needs a system or a subscription or a policy, and that is worth saying plainly, because the word backup suggests something larger and more expensive than what is actually required. A second copy in a different place is the whole idea. The hard part was never the copying; it was knowing which things had only one.