"Virginia's government servers, generally speaking, are maintained on contract by Northrop Grumman, and they use Iron Mountain for offsite backups. They may even be replicating the data across two locations in different parts of the state, which are quite intentionally situated on two different tectonic plates. So yeah, they have backups. Also, the shutdown of affected servers is standard policy during a security incident, so that they can be preserved for forensic analysis and to prevent further damage. They seem to be doing the best they can with a bad situation." - Tony Gambone