A full image of the machine, encrypted and stored offsite, backed up every hour. Restore one document you deleted this morning, or the whole computer after the drive dies.
A drive fails, a computer is stolen, ransomware encrypts everything, or someone empties a folder that turns out to have mattered. Whatever the cause, the question is the same and it gets asked once: what can we get back, and how long will it take?
Most people answer that question worse than they expected. Files are on the computer. Some of them are also in OneDrive or Dropbox, which feels like a backup right up to the moment it isn't — because sync is a mirror. Delete a file and it deletes in the cloud. Encrypt your files with ransomware and the encrypted versions sync up faithfully. A mirror reflects whatever happened, including the thing you wish hadn't.
And even when the files survive, the computer doesn't. Your documents are the part that is easy to replace. The days spent reinstalling programs, re-entering license keys, reconnecting the printer and getting everything back the way you had it — that is the real cost, and file sync does nothing about it.
Configured to take a full image of your computer. An image is not a folder of your documents. It is the machine: the operating system, your installed programs, your settings and preferences, your accounts, and your files. Restored onto working hardware, you get the computer back as it was — not a blank Windows install and a folder of documents to sort out.
Backups run to an offsite data center in the United States. Your data is encrypted with AES-256 on your computer, before it goes anywhere — it travels over an encrypted connection, sits encrypted in the data center, and is only unscrambled when you ask for something back.
Nothing depends on you remembering to plug in a drive, and nothing sits in the same house as the computer it is protecting — which is what matters when the problem is theft, fire, or water.
Full image backup is standard, not an upgrade.
That line is deliberate. There is no file-only tier here, and no monthly surcharge to get the real thing.
Everything above describes what the backup does on a Windows computer. Total PC Protection and Data Backup are not offered for Macs. A Mac is a different machine to secure, and it doesn't fit the profile this service was built around.
That is not us saying a Mac is safe. Macs are not immune to viruses, spyware or other malware. macOS has strong security built into it and infections are less common than on older Windows systems, but there is malicious software written specifically to go after Macs — security matters every bit as much there.
If you have a Mac you want protected, get in touch. There are things we can do for it; they just aren't this package. Send us a message or call 414-431-8772 and someone will talk it through with you.
You deleted the wrong file, or saved over four hours of work. We restore that one file. It takes minutes and you get on with your day.
The drive is dead, the computer is gone, or ransomware got in. Having a full copy of the machine sitting somewhere else is the answer to that, and it is the only thing that is.
Getting files back takes minutes. Once a restore starts, individual files come back almost immediately. In a recent real case we put 40 GB back onto a new computer in about fifteen minutes. How long yours takes depends on how much there is and how fast your internet connection is.
Rebuilding a whole machine takes about two business days, and it happens in our shop in Oak Creek. A full image restore isn't something that can be done over a remote connection. If you're not local, there are two ways to go: we restore your files remotely onto a new computer — fast, though your programs would need reinstalling — or you ship the machine to us, we do the whole thing, and we ship it back.
| OneDrive / Dropbox / Google Drive | Data Backup | |
|---|---|---|
| Keeps your files available on other devices | Yes | Not its job |
| Deleting a file deletes it everywhere | Yes | No |
| Ransomware encryption propagates to the copy | Yes | No |
| Backs up programs, settings, and Windows itself | No | Yes |
| Can rebuild a computer onto new hardware | No | Yes |
| Encrypted and stored offsite | Yes | Yes |
Keep using Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive. They're good at what they do. They just aren't this.
All hard drives, like humans, have a 100% mortality rate. It is not a matter of if they are going to die, but when.
That applies to your external drive too, and it's worth being clear about what yours is actually for.
If it's your backup drive, it holds a copy of what's on your computer. We don't back up your backup — we back up the original, so the same files are covered either way. What we add is somewhere else for them to live. A drive sitting next to the computer is in the same house as the fire, the same flood, and the same burglary. When it's destroyed, dead or stolen, it's of no use to you.
If it's where you keep things that aren't on the computer — the photo archive, the video projects, the scans that got moved off to free up space — that's different. Data Backup covers what's on your computer's internal drive, so those files aren't in it. We can back up an external drive as well, for an additional fee. Tell us at setup and we'll work out what you'd want covered and what it costs.
And the honest part. In twenty years of doing this, the most common backup we find is none at all. The second most common is one that quietly stopped working, because the drive wasn't plugged in when the scheduled time came around. A backup that needs you to remember something is a backup that eventually doesn't run. Ours runs every hour, whether you're thinking about it or not.
Your computer is backed up once an hour, every hour, in the background. The most work you can lose is the last hour of it — not the last day, and not however long it's been since you last thought about backing up.
You won't feel it happening. After the first backup, only what actually changed gets sent, which on a normal day is a very small amount. There's no window to close, no prompt to dismiss, and nothing that grinds the machine to a halt while you're trying to work.
If the computer was off, it catches up. A computer that sits shut down all weekend isn't a computer with a hole in its backup — the missed run happens at the next opportunity, once it's on again.
Ransomware doesn't always announce itself the day it arrives. Neither does a file that was corrupted, or a folder someone tidied away six weeks ago. A backup that only holds yesterday's copy is no help at all when yesterday's copy is already broken. So we keep a lot of them.
We keep your backups for three years.
That's three years from the day we set you up. A backup can only reach back as far as the day it started — nobody can hand you a copy of last year's files if last year's files were never backed up. What we can tell you is that from here forward, the history builds up behind you and stays there.
If your work means records have to be kept longer than that, tell us at setup and we'll arrange it — at no extra charge.
About $16.67 a month. Annual billing, per computer.
Full image backup — operating system, programs, settings, and files — running every hour to an encrypted offsite data center.
Total PC Protection carries a $99 one-time setup fee per computer. Add Data Backup on that computer at the time you order, and the setup fee is waived.
So in year one, Data Backup effectively costs you $101 instead of $200 — the $200 for the backup, less the $99 you're no longer paying to get set up.
You can add Data Backup at any time. The setup fee waiver is the one part that has a deadline — it only applies when Data Backup is ordered alongside Total PC Protection, because it's the setup session itself being paid for.
Data Backup is an add-on to Total PC Protection, not a standalone product — backing up a computer that isn't protected in the first place is solving the second problem and ignoring the first.
Tell us how many computers you have and we'll get you scheduled. No pressure, no salespeople, no call center.