Cyclone season runs from November to April in North Queensland, and every business in Townsville knows the drill — secure the outdoor furniture, fill the bath, charge the torches, check the food in the freezer. What's less commonly done well is the IT side. After Yasi in 2011, the floods of 2019, and the steady drumbeat of smaller systems every year, we've helped a lot of Townsville businesses recover from preventable IT losses. Here's the prep checklist worth running before the next system forms.
The single most valuable thing you can do this week is restore a file from your backup, right now, to confirm the backup actually contains what you think it contains. If your backup is failing silently — and we've seen it many times — you won't know until the day you need it.
Specifically, log into your backup system, pick a file from yesterday, restore it to a test folder, and verify it opens correctly. If you can't do this in under 10 minutes, you don't have a usable backup. Either it's not backing up what you thought, or you don't know how to restore from it under pressure.
If you're a Townsville business with no documented backup process, this is the single most important problem to solve before cyclone season. We can set up automated, tested, off-site backups for most small businesses in an afternoon. The cost is a fraction of what it'd cost to recreate even a few weeks of lost work.
Local backup is not enough during a cyclone. If your office floods or loses the roof, the local backup drives are at the same risk as the original computers. "Off-site" used to mean a backup tape taken home by the owner; today it almost always means cloud.
Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange Online) and Google Workspace both keep your data in geographically distributed data centres, far away from your office. If your office takes a direct hit, your email, documents and shared drives are still accessible from any internet connection. For most small Townsville businesses, this alone is the simplest disaster-recovery strategy that exists.
If you're still running an on-premises file server with no cloud sync, that's the highest-leverage thing to fix. We can migrate most small business file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in a couple of days, and you'll get cyclone protection plus better remote-work capability as a bonus.
Even if you don't lose power directly, the brownouts, surges, and cycling power that come with a cyclone will damage hardware. Drives are particularly vulnerable — sudden power loss during a write operation can corrupt the drive's filesystem irrecoverably.
Every server, every business-critical desktop, and ideally every router and switch should be on a UPS. The UPS gives you 5-15 minutes of clean power to shut down properly, and protects against the surges and sags that destroy hardware. A small business UPS is $200-$400; the cost of a single drive recovery is often more than that.
We also recommend whole-of-office surge protection at the switchboard for any business in a building you own — a $500 surge protector at the main board protects every device downstream from voltage spikes that come down the power line during a storm.
When the cyclone is bearing down on Sunday afternoon and you're locking up the office, every staff member should know exactly what to do. A one-page IT shutdown checklist saves you from preventable losses.
Things that should be on the list: power down all servers gracefully (not just yanking the cord), shut down all desktops cleanly, unplug computers from power AND from network cables (lightning can come down either), elevate any equipment that's currently on the floor, take any portable drives or USB devices home with you, take a photo of every desk's setup before unplugging anything (so you can rebuild the cable mess afterwards), and confirm the cloud backup ran today.
Print the checklist and put it somewhere obvious. The staff member who locks the office on Sunday afternoon shouldn't be inventing the procedure on the day.
If your office is unusable for two weeks after a cyclone, can your team work from home? Could a sales person check email and quote from a phone? Could the bookkeeper run payroll from their laptop on home internet? Could the customer service team take calls?
If the answer to any of those is no, fix it now. The cost is low and the benefit is permanent — you're not just preparing for cyclones, you're enabling general flexibility. Microsoft 365 + Teams + cloud-based business software covers most use cases. Specialist apps may need a remote-desktop or VPN solution, which we can set up.
After Yasi, businesses that were already cloud-based were running again within days from coffee shops, homes, and other people's offices. Businesses that depended on a physical office and a local server were down for weeks.
When you walk back into the office after the cyclone has passed, the priority order matters. Don't power anything on yet. If there's any sign of water — even a damp patch on the carpet — call us before you plug anything in. Powering on water-damaged electronics is the #1 cause of unrecoverable failure.
Photograph everything for insurance before you move it. Inspect every device's power cable for damage. If the building's power is back but you're not sure it's stable, check with neighbours before plugging anything sensitive in. Keep your insurance contact details accessible (not on the computer that might be damaged).
We're available for post-storm callouts as soon as roads are passable. The earlier we can assess water-affected gear, the better the chance of recovery — for drives in particular, time matters.
Before cyclone season starts: ✓ Test-restore a file from your backup. ✓ Confirm critical data is in the cloud. ✓ Install UPS on servers + critical desktops. ✓ Print and post the shutdown checklist. ✓ Verify staff can work remotely. ✓ Document the post-storm assessment plan.
The day of the storm: ✓ Run today's cloud backup early. ✓ Power down servers gracefully. ✓ Unplug everything from power and network. ✓ Elevate gear off the floor. ✓ Photograph desk setups. ✓ Confirm offsite backup completed.
After: ✓ Don't power anything water-affected. ✓ Photograph for insurance. ✓ Inspect cables. ✓ Test the power supply. ✓ Restore from backup if needed. ✓ Call your IT support if anything's wrong.
If you'd like a hand getting the checklist set up properly for your business — backups verified, UPS deployed, shutdown procedure documented, remote-work tested — get in touch. We work with Townsville businesses across all industries and sizes.