When Device Data Disappears: 4 Endpoint Backup Gaps for MSPs

A Monday Morning Every MSP Recognizes

Picture a common Monday as a managed service provider (MSP): you’re supporting a 40-person accounting firm where a senior associate's laptop just won't boot. Her customer files are synced to OneDrive, so she assumes everything is fine. Then she asks about the Excel templates on her desktop, the financial PDFs in her Downloads folder, and the local Outlook archive she's kept for three years. None of it was synced.

For many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), this is how they learn their backup plan has a hole in it. Their email is covered, OneDrive and SharePoint are covered, and even their servers have backups. But while most computer backup systems for small businesses focus on Microsoft 365 and servers, company laptop backup is a gap that goes unchecked until something bad happens. And when it does, the data on that device is often the only copy.

Here are four common scenarios that cause laptop data to vanish, what makes each easy to overlook for MSPs and how to close the gap. Plus, we’ve included a question to bring to your next client review to understand if endpoint backup is right for them.

1. A hardware failure or refresh

Since we’re on the subject, refreshes and hardware failures happen often but rarely on a regular schedule, which is why they cause so much trouble. The planned move of a user to a new device usually means manual file transfers, missed folders, and an employee who loses hours of productivity rebuilding their setup. When a laptop or workstation fails, your team skips planning entirely and must set up a replacement device from scratch, with little preparation.

The costs add up for both you and your clients. Your team absorbs the expense of lost IT administration hours, while a majority of SMB clients can lose between $1,000 and $5,000 for a single hour of downtime (ITIC, 2025).

The challenge for MSPs: Every failure and refresh becomes a hands-on ticket. Multiply that across clients on staggered hardware cycles, and it consumes technician hours moving files that could simply move themselves. Backing up employee endpoints can double as a device replacement workflow to easily move a user's data to their new laptop. Granular recovery can restore anything from a single file to a full device onto a new machine. Plus, endpoint backup tools with self-service recovery let users restore their own files, which keeps small requests out of your queue.

Ask at your next client review: "The last time you replaced a laptop, how long did it take that employee to get back to full productivity? How many hours did they spend setting up their machine?"

2. An employee leaves

When employees leave, offboarding tends to focus on access: disable the account, collect the hardware, reassign licenses, etc. The data on their laptops gets less attention. Files saved outside synced folders, local project work, and application data can disappear the moment the device is wiped and reissued.

That loss can carry an additional compliance weight many may miss. For clients in healthcare, finance, or education, records on a former employee's device may still fall under HIPAA, GDPR, FERPA, and be required in a legal hold.

The challenge for MSPs: Offboarding is often rushed and driven by the client's HR team or office manager. Even with notice, you rarely know what the employee saved locally and whether it’s important, so preserving it means manually copying an entire drive just in case. Continuous workstation backup can remove that guesswork. Data on the device, including files outside synced folders, is protected throughout the employee's tenure and survives after the laptop is wiped. Built in data encryption and legal hold can keep that information compliant and available for as long as retention requirements or legal matters demand.

Ask at your next client review: "When someone leaves, who decides what happens to the data on their laptop and how long do you need to keep it?"

3. A company laptop is lost or stolen

Laptops leave the office every day. They sit in cars, airports, and coffee shops. And sometimes they don't come back. When a company laptop goes missing, the client loses the data on it and may expose that data to whoever has the device. That can include customer records, financial files, and anything else the employee saved locally.

The challenge for MSPs: Laptops are often closed, asleep, or offline when backups are scheduled to run. And remote and hybrid employees rarely connect to the office network or VPN that older backup setups depend on. If the last successful backup ran two weeks ago, that's your restore point. But a modern business laptop backup solution can run silently in the background, outside the corporate network, as often as every minute. When a device is completely offline, any changes can be stored in an encrypted local cache and uploaded once the connection returns. Additional features like geotracking help locate a missing device, and remote wiping removes its data before anyone can access it.

Ask at your next client review: "If an employee's laptop was lost or stolen today, how much of their recent work could we recover, and could we wipe the device?"

4. Ransomware hits a workstation

Endpoints are a favorite ransomware target, and SMBs are squarely in range. Twenty-eight percent of SMBs reported endpoint attacks in the past year (OpenText Cybersecurity Threat Report, 2025), and 90% of recent SafePay ransomware group victims were small or medium-sized businesses (Flare, 2026). When an infected laptop has to be wiped, recovery depends on a clean, recent copy of its data. SMBs without these types of backups can expect to pay $192,000 more during a ransomware attack (At-Bay, 2023).

The challenge for MSPs: Most MSPs recognize this threat and layer endpoint protection and EDR on client devices to reduce the risk. But no tool stops every attack. When one gets through, recovery depends on a backup that is both recent and restorable. Even if you have backups, neither of those factors are guaranteed. In fact, twenty-one percent of organizations fail to recover from backups for these reasons (Apricorn, 2025). Frequent, unattended workstation backups keep the restore point close to the moment of the attack, and automated heartbeat checks confirm protection is running, so a clean copy is there when you need it.

Ask at your next client review: "If ransomware hit one of your laptops tomorrow, how recent would the restore point be and when did we last test a recovery?"

Endpoint Backup is Now Available in OpenText Secure Cloud

All four scenarios point to the same MSP challenges: deploying agents across many clients, protecting geographically dispersed devices that rarely touch the network, handling unpredictable recovery ticket volume, and managing yet another tool with its own login and bill. That's why we’ve added OpenText Core Endpoint Backup to the OpenText Secure Cloud ecosystem, available today.

Secure Cloud already presents a singular platform for email security, endpoint protection, security awareness training, archiving and more. Now, that same security platform becomes your complete backup platform, with business laptop backup joining our existing SaaS (cloud to cloud) and server backup tools, all living in the same place.

• One login. Manage endpoint backup for every client in the same Secure Cloud session as your security tools, with multi-tenant management and role-based access for your team, client admins and users.
• Simple, silent deployment. Agents install, activate, and start backing up Windows and macOS devices without interrupting users or requiring heavy admin from your IT team.
• Light on bandwidth. Global deduplication and compression decrease backup-related WAN traffic by up to 98% during business hours, reducing both network and productivity loss.
• Simple licensing. Pay per activated device with no storage limits, no seat minimums, and no monthly commit, on the same invoice as your other Secure Cloud products.
• 24/7 support. Receive support from a single, in-house point of contact for technical issues, alongside access to your dedicated partner account manager.

For clients who rely on you for security, this also strengthens their overall cyber resilience. Prevention and recovery both sit inside the OpenText Secure Cloud platform, so when an attack gets through, restoring the device becomes part of the response you’re already coordinating within OpenText tools.

Close the gap before your clients find it

Employee device data loss always starts the same way: important data living on one laptop and nowhere else. Most clients won’t notice that gap until important files are already gone, when it’s too late for you to prevent it.

At your next client review, pick one of the questions above and listen closely to your client’s response. The answer will tell you quickly whether employee devices are included and prioritized in their cyber resilience strategy.

To learn more, check out the self-guided OpenText Core Endpoint Backup product tour or contact our team to start your free 30-day trial.