1. Start here: one copy in one place is not a backup
In the first half of 2026, more than 30% of the recovery jobs we handled began the same way: "I do have a backup, but..." But the backup drive was plugged into the same PC as the original. But the NAS sat on the same UPS in the same server room. But only the employee who had already left knew the cloud account password. None of that is a backup. It is another copy of the data in the same basket.
There is one real standard, the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of the data, on two different kinds of media, with one copy stored off-site. It is easy to recite, and 90% of small and mid-sized businesses fail the off-site part. That is precisely the copy that saves you in a ransomware attack, a fire or a theft.
2. Three media options, priced for 2026
Take a 20-person trading company: eight office PCs and one file server, about 4 TB of data worth protecting: accounting books, customer records, scanned contracts and design source files, growing by roughly 10 GB a day. Here is what the three mainstream options actually cost.
| Option | Upfront | Annual running cost | Strengths | Weak spots |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise cloud drive (for example Alibaba Cloud Drive for business, Nutstore Teams) | About RMB 0 | RMB 2,000-6,000 for 20 accounts | Off-site by nature, reachable anywhere, version history | The first full upload of 4 TB takes days; limits on large files; the data sits in the cloud, a compliance concern in sensitive industries |
| Local NAS (Synology DS923+, 4-bay) | About RMB 8,500 (unit RMB 3,800 plus RMB 4,700 for two 8 TB enterprise drives) | About RMB 300 in electricity | Fast on the LAN, large capacity, RAID1 possible, snapshots that blunt ransomware | Still in the office, so a fire, a theft or an encryption run takes it along with everything else; someone has to administer it |
| Portable drive cold backup (two 4 TB drives, rotated) | About RMB 1,600 | About RMB 800 a year, replacing the pair every three years | Cheapest, and the most complete physical isolation | Depends on human discipline; in practice fewer than 30% of staff keep it up; an idle drive still fails |
What we recommend is a combination, not a choice among the three. The NAS runs automated nightly backups of the file server and every PC. The cloud carries real-time off-site sync of the small critical core — accounting books and contracts, the data whose loss stops the company — usually under 200 GB. A portable drive takes a monthly cold archive. That lands at about RMB 10,000 up front and under RMB 1,000 a year. Against a market rate where a single 4 TB RAID5 recovery starts at RMB 20,000, it is cheap insurance.
3. Four traps that most backup plans miss
- RAID is not backup. RAID1 and RAID5 protect against a drive dying. They do nothing about accidental deletion, ransomware, a controller failure or a bad command, and the array faithfully copies your mistake to every disk. In March this year, a mold factory in Panyu lost two drives from a RAID5 array and paid RMB 24,000 for recovery. It already owned an old NAS bought for backups. Nobody had powered it on in three months.
- A backup you have never restored is not a backup. An unverified backup is Schrödinger's backup. Run a restore drill every quarter: pull a random file out of the backup and open it. Synology snapshots, Windows VSS and cloud version history all count for nothing until someone has clicked restore and watched the file open.
- Ransomware looks for your backups first. Ransomware in 2026 routinely enumerates SMB shares on the LAN and encrypts the NAS along with everything else. Countermeasures: do not publish the backup NAS share to the whole office network, restrict it to the backup server's IP address; turn on snapshots with a retention policy; and keep the off-site copy, whether cloud or cold drive, isolated either physically or by account.
- Credentials held by one person are a single point of failure. At least two people should hold the cloud backup account and the NAS administrator password, or both should live in the company password manager. We have handled a case where a departing employee took the cloud account with him and three years of backups sat there, visible but unreachable.
4. Copy this by company size
| Size | Recommended setup | Budget reference |
|---|---|---|
| Studio, under 5 people | 2-bay NAS in RAID1, cloud sync for core documents, one portable drive for a monthly copy | About RMB 4,000 up front |
| 10-30 people | 4-bay NAS in RAID5 or SHR, scheduled jobs covering everything, enterprise cloud sync for finance and contracts, quarterly cold-drive rotation | RMB 10,000-15,000 up front |
| 30+ people or any server | Backup server or NAS, an off-site replica such as a backup node hosted in a data center, a snapshot policy, and a quarterly restore drill written into procedure | From RMB 20,000 up front, hosting billed monthly |
5. Two companies, one month, two outcomes
A freight forwarder in Nansha had its file server encrypted: 1.2 TB of business data, with the attackers asking US$30,000. There was no usable backup. The NAS sat in the same office on the same domain, and it was encrypted along with the server. The company paid RMB 18,000 for low-level data extraction, recovered about 70%, and lost the remaining customer correspondence for good, along with two major clients who walked.
The same month, a design studio in Panyu was hit as well. Its architecture was different: workstations to nightly NAS snapshots with 30-day retention, and core project files syncing to the cloud in real time. IT spotted the anomaly, cut the network and rolled back from snapshot. Downtime was four hours. Data loss was zero. Recovery cost was zero.
Two companies of similar size. The difference was a RMB 10,000 backup decision made a year earlier.
6. Three things you can do today
Whatever the budget, start now. First, list the data whose loss would stop the company, usually under 200 GB, and put it on cloud sync today. Second, check when your existing backup last completed successfully; anything older than a month means you have no backup. Third, run one restore drill, recover a file and open it. None of that costs money, and together it moves you from unprotected to a passing grade.
If the incident has already happened, stop writing to the failed disk immediately and follow the workflow on our data recovery page. For a full backup design, we are at 3-8 Jinlong Road, Dalong Street, Panyu, and can be reached on 020-39029800 or +86-188-2512-6836. On-site surveys and design proposals are free for customers in Panyu and Nansha.