As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly create a backup strategy for your small business.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 2 hours until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a blank document and record your business systems, devices, cloud services, website, databases and storage locations without pasting confidential data.
   2. Ask the person who manages your IT or systems to confirm which data is important, where it is stored, who can access it and what must be restored first.
   3. Paste the confirmed inventory and the remaining business details into the prompt, leaving unknown items marked as unknown rather than guessing.
   4. Ask the chatbot to produce the strategy, then copy its open questions and product requirements into a separate action list.
   5. Compare every proposed backup target and retention assumption against the current settings and documentation for each service, including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or your actual providers.
   6. Ask an IT security specialist to check the design for coverage, access control, ransomware resilience, personal-data handling and practical recovery priorities.
   7. Set up the agreed backups with the responsible administrator, then perform a test restore of representative files and an important system while recording the result.
   8. Update the strategy with the restore evidence, owners and review dates, and store the final document separately from the systems it describes.

   Prompt

   Create a practical backup strategy for my small business in the UK. Treat this as a draft for implementation, not as a guarantee of security.
   
   Business context:
   - Business type: [business type]
   - Number of staff and working locations: [details]
   - Maximum acceptable data loss: [how much recent work we could recreate]
   - Maximum acceptable downtime: [how long we could operate without each important system]
   - Person responsible for IT: [role or name]
   
   Systems and data:
   - Devices: [laptops, desktops, phones, servers and network storage]
   - Cloud services: [Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, accounting, CRM, website, file storage and other services]
   - Locally stored data: [details]
   - Databases and business applications: [details]
   - Website and domain arrangements: [details]
   - Data containing personal or confidential information: [details, without pasting the data itself]
   - Current backup tools, locations and schedules: [details]
   
   Produce:
   1. An inventory showing what must be backed up and who owns each item.
   2. A backup design covering separate copies, off-site storage, access controls, encryption, retention and protection against ransomware.
   3. A schedule for backups and a plain-English explanation of the trade-offs.
   4. A recovery priority order for systems and data.
   5. A restore-testing plan with specific tests, evidence to record and a sensible review frequency, without inventing a frequency where the information is insufficient.
   6. A short implementation checklist and a list of questions an IT security specialist must resolve.
   
   Do not invent facts about my systems, suppliers, legal duties or product features. Mark missing information as an open question. Do not recommend a product unless you explain what requirement it meets and what I must verify in its current documentation. Highlight any point that needs professional review. Keep the result specific enough to implement, but do not give me commands or configuration changes until the relevant systems and platforms have been confirmed.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.