Very prominent. On-premises and in the cloud, backups and snapshots let you travel back in time so that when things go wrong you can retrace your steps and chart a different course of events (e.g., recover a document, a drive, or a healthy system state). OneDrive and Google Drive have powerful revision management features.
A related tool, built specifically for text, is version control; its best-known example is Git, written in 2005 to manage the Linux kernel itself.1 Git keeps a complete, dated history of a set of files, so any earlier version can be restored and every change can be traced to who made it and when. It is not only for software. The same tool that versions code can version contracts, policies, employee handbooks, board minutes, and proposals: any text whose changes matter. The Council of the District of Columbia keeps the city's legal code this way, in a public Git repository.2
With virtualization and containerization, it is possible to travel to the future. You can test programs, updates, and miscellaneous changes in a sandbox before implementing them in production.
Virtualizations and backups can be combined. You can save copies of your Virtual Machines in the state in which they were yesterday, a month ago, or years ago. Fifty at a time if necessary.
Within the perimeter of the network, our technologies of choice for travel back in time are Rsync, Rclone, Rsnapshot, and Acronis (among others).
For virtualization, we use Proxmox, a web-based hyper-converged infrastructure software running on KVM, the native Open Source Linux hypervisor. KVM is built into the Linux kernel, not another layer of possibly conflicting third-party middleware (like VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Oracle VirtualBox). Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, IBM Cloud, and much of the wider cloud industry are built on KVM.3
Backups, snapshots, version history, and sandboxed testing are one discipline pointing two ways: keep every state worth returning to, and rehearse every change before it is real. Run that way, a bad day costs minutes instead of weeks. It is the discipline the Guild builds into every environment we run, so a client can always step back to safe ground, or look ahead before committing to a change.
A business that can return to any good state from its past, and rehearse any change before it goes live, is never more than a moment from recovery.
Concierge CIO Partners is a unified Guild of senior technologists providing dedicated, long-term fiduciary IT leadership to midmarket service firms. It offers a strategic alternative to fragile internal IT silos and to Managed Service Providers who advise you on what to buy and are paid on what you buy. With transparent unit pricing and an automated service catalog, the Guild eliminates administrative bloat and ensures every IT dollar spent and decision made directly drives your financial performance.
1 Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to manage development of the Linux kernel, after the version-control tool the kernel had used revoked its free-of-charge status: git-scm.com. 2 The Council of the District of Columbia maintains the DC Code as a public Git repository, updated through 2026: github.com/DCCouncil/law-xml. 3 Google Cloud states that Compute Engine runs on the open-source KVM hypervisor; Amazon's Nitro hypervisor is likewise built on core KVM technology. Microsoft Azure, by contrast, runs on Hyper-V, which is why it is not listed here: Google Cloud.