Email Safety and File Backup: What Every Business Team Needs to Know

A client recently asked me for some practical cybersecurity guidance for their team. The threats are real, the tactics are simple, and the cost of ignoring them is too high. Here is exactly what I shared with them — and what every business owner and employee should know.

Email Safety

Tip 1 — Verify the sender. Always check the actual email address the message came from. Double-click the sender name and confirm it is not a Gmail or Yahoo address hiding behind a spoofed display name. Scammers routinely impersonate vendors, banks, and even your own colleagues this way.

Tip 2 — Hover before you click. Before clicking any link, hover your mouse over it and check where it actually leads. The displayed text and the real destination URL should match. A button that says “Log In to Your Account” pointing to a random domain is a trap.

Tip 3 — Never open attachments blindly. Never open an attachment without first confirming the sender’s address is correct and that the message sounds like something that person would actually write. If anything feels off, send the person a text — not a reply to the email. The scammer may be monitoring the inbox and will reply pretending to be them.

Tip 4 — Always call before changing payment info. Never update wire instructions, banking details, or payment information based on an email alone. Always pick up the phone and call the person requesting it using a number you already have on file. This single habit prevents the most expensive fraud businesses face.

File Safety and Backup

The core principle: if your data only exists in one place, it is not backed up — it is just stored. A single hardware failure, theft, or ransomware attack ends it. Build redundancy now, not after the loss.

Move your local folders into Dropbox. On Windows, go to your Dropbox folder and create a folder called DesktopFolders. Inside it, create folders for Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos. Then right-click each local folder, go to Properties, Location, Move, and redirect it to the corresponding Dropbox folder. Your local folders now live inside Dropbox and sync automatically. A paid Dropbox plan is worth every dollar of the roughly $10 per month — losing years of client files costs far more.

Back up offsite with Backblaze. For large or critical data, we use Backblaze.com to back up entire hard drives to the cloud. At approximately $5 per month per computer with unlimited storage, it is one of the best investments a business can make. We have one machine with 20TB of video production files — all of it backed up continuously.

The goal is simple: if your computer disappeared today, your data should be safe tomorrow. Between Dropbox for daily working files and Backblaze for deep archives, that is exactly where you want to be.

— Thomas Roman, Founder, Roman Media Group