Your project files survive a flood, as long as a copy of them lives outside the Houston or flood prone area. Your ability to work on them does not. A Katy construction firm with off-site backup and a written plan can be operating without interruption or in as little 4 hours. A firm without one is usually down for two to six weeks, because the office is closed or the data is lost.
The statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season falls in the first half of September. Most of the work below is configuration, not construction but it takes weeks, not days.
The Real Problem Isn't Losing Files. It's Not Being Able to Work
Most contractors ask this as a data question: will we lose the drawings?
If you're on Microsoft 365 with supplemental backup, or a server with a disaster recovery backup solution, the answer is usually no. What stops is everything around them. The building sits behind a closed road. The block has no power. The server in the utility closet took eighteen inches of water, and accounting was on that server, which is why you can't cut a check.
So the real question isn't "do we still have our files." It's "how fast can people get back to work."
The mistake we see most: a firm buys good cloud backup for the file server and never asks where the accounting data lives. Sage, Viewpoint, Foundation, or QuickBooks Desktop sitting on that same server is what stops payroll and draws. Make sure it's in the backup, and that someone can get it running somewhere else.
What Actually Survives, by Where the File Lives
Your data can sit in multiple places, and they behave completely differently in a flood.
| Where the file lives | Does it survive? | Is it usable while the office is closed? | What actually goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical, on-premise server | Depends. If water reaches it, then no. Ground-floor and closet-mounted gear is the usual loss. | Depends. If the building still has power, yes. But even undamaged, it's offline with the building. | If the project drive and accounting all live here, one flood causes multiple outages. |
| Desktop or workstation hard drive | Depends. If water reaches it, then no. | Depends. If the building still has power, yes. But even undamaged, it's offline with the building. | Local takeoffs, Revit local files, unsaved markups, desktop-only Outlook data is inaccessible, or worse - gone. |
| Cloud sync (i.e. OneDrive / SharePoint etc.) | Yes. The copy in Microsoft's data center is unaffected. | Yes, from any device with credentials and a connection. | Sync is not backup. A file deleted, overwritten, or encrypted before the flood is still gone after. |
| Off-site backup | Yes, if the off-site copy is genuinely outside the flood prone area or has a cloud backup option. | Yes but only as fast as your restore/spin up process. | Untested restores. Retention too short to reach past the event. An "off-site" copy that's a drive in the owner's truck at the office. |
| Physical files/papers | Depends. If water reaches it, then no. | No. | A snapshot. Every revision issued after printing is missing, which makes them potentially outdated. |
Two rows survive and stay usable, and only one of the two protects you against anything besides weather. If you're unsure which side of that line your drawings sit on: do you have a backup for OneDrive or do you rely on Microsoft? Did you know Microsoft has a shared-responsibility model?
The Two Questions That Decide How Bad It Gets
- How much recent work can you afford to redo?
That's your recovery point objective. If backup runs nightly at 10 p.m. and water comes in at 4 p.m., you've lost a day of markups, RFI responses, and takeoff. Ten people times eight hours is 80 labor hours to rebuild from memory, and some of it can't be rebuilt.
- How long can you afford to be stopped?
That's your recovery time objective, measured against your next hard deadline rather than a generic industry number. Storm on the 12th, draw due the 25th, two weeks to reassemble accounting means you missed it.
Both are things you can buy. Cloud failover for your server, a couple of spare configured laptops, cellular backup internet. Going from three weeks down to one day is a budget line, not a miracle.
Three Things to Do
In this order. The first two carry the most protection for the time they take, so if a storm shows up before you finish, you've covered what matters.
- Get the data out of the building.
Move active project files to SharePoint or a hosted file service, so no current work depends on a box in Katy. Then put real backup behind it.
- Prove the restore works.
Not a backup job reporting success. An actual timed restore, to a different machine, of a real project folder and the accounting database. You want a dated document saying how long it took and what came back. GC security questionnaires ask for this too, so the work pays for itself twice.
- Write a written plan and print it.
In every truck's glovebox and taped inside the trailer: who calls the shutdown, the phone tree with cell numbers, your IT provider's after-hours line, where everyone works instead, and the first people to call at the GC and the bank. A plan that only exists digitally fails exactly when you need it, because it's in the system that's down.
How a Katy Firm Made Payroll With No Power in the Building
The clearest example we have of this didn't involve any flooding at all.
The derecho that hit Houston in May 2024 never put water in this client's office. It just took the power out. That was enough to stop the company cold.
The 10-person firm ran their accounting and payroll software on a server in their office. With the building dark, nobody could remote in to reach it. Payroll was due that day and people who don't get paid on Friday don't show up on Monday.
They already had backup and disaster recovery running on that server, which meant a current copy of the entire machine - operating system, accounting software, and data - was sitting ready to run somewhere else. We brought the server up as a virtual machine in the cloud and their team logged into it from home and payroll went out on time.
Why Construction Firms Work With Alexaur
We've supported AEC firms across Katy, TX and Greater West Houston since 2001, family-owned the whole way, through the same storms in the same zip codes.
- 98% of support tickets resolved on the first call
- Average client tenure of more than 10 years
- 100+ combined years of cybersecurity experience on staff
- Clients who have implemented our full security and business continuity recommendations have not reported a business-disrupting security incident.
- Fluent in the software you actually run: AutoCAD, Revit, Bluebeam, SolidWorks, Procore, Navisworks, ProjectWise, and OnScreen Takeoff. See our IT solutions for AEC firms
- Dell & Lenovo Partner
- Managed Protection Security Suite Associate Accreditation
- MSP Pro
- Keeper Sales Professional
- Network+ Certified
- SonicWall Certified
Find Out Your Real Recovery Time Before The Next Natural Disaster
Most firms don't know their own number. Knowing backups run is not the same as knowing how many hours it takes to get eleven people working again from somewhere else. The only way to find out is to test it, and the only good time to test is before the season peaks.
Start with a free network assessment to see where your project data actually lives, or book a 15-minute discovery call and we'll walk your setup against the table above: what comes back, what doesn't, what it costs to close the gap.
Call 281-646-1200 or email results@alexaur.com.
