These aren’t hypotheticals. Here’s what good backup looks like when things go wrong.
Microsoft 365 Backup Disgruntled employee deletes four years of emails before leaving
A client’s sales manager resigned unexpectedly and, before handing over, deleted thousands of emails from their account, including client correspondence, contracts, and outstanding quotes. By the time the business realised what had happened, the data had long since passed Microsoft’s standard 30-day purge window. Because WikiTech’s M365 backup had been running daily for six months, we restored the full mailbox to the exact state from the day before the deletion. The client recovered every email and every attachment. The sales handover was completed without loss, and a potential legal dispute was avoided entirely.
OutcomeFull mailbox restored. Zero data loss. Same day.
Server Image Backup Virtual machine corruption takes down a business-critical server overnight
A manufacturing client’s primary business application ran on a VMware virtual machine hosted on their on-premise server. One morning the VM failed to boot, corruption caused by an unexpected host restart during a Windows update. The application vendor confirmed the server would need to be rebuilt, estimating two to three days of downtime including reinstalling the application and reconfiguring data. WikiTech had been taking nightly image-level backups of the VM. We restored the entire virtual machine from the previous night’s backup, had the server running and verified within a few hours, and the business was operational the same morning the fault was reported.
OutcomeFull VM restored. Back online same morning. Avoided 2–3 days downtime.
Endpoint Backup Corrupt Windows update bricks a laptop, with no way to repair it
A user’s laptop stopped booting after a Windows update went wrong. The update had partially installed and left the operating system in an unrecoverable state: Windows repair tools failed, and a full reinstall was the only option suggested by Microsoft support. The user had OneDrive for most files, but not everything. Some documents were saved locally, and years of application settings and configurations were at risk. WikiTech had deployed a Veeam Agent backup to an external drive as part of a low-cost endpoint protection plan. We performed a full image restore to new hardware and had the user back at their desk, with every application, setting, and file exactly as they’d left it, in under four hours, compared to what would have been days of reinstallation and inevitable data loss.
OutcomeFull image restore in under 4 hours. No data loss. No reinstall.