The 3-2-1 rule, for a perfect backup. September 5, 2019 – Posted in: Backup, News – Tags: Backup

The problems with not following a set of rules…

Backing up your precious Data isn’t something you should disregard; you need to ensure that your critical information will survive any circumstance.

Many Businesses & individuals have suffered from losing data following system failure, file corruption, accidental deletion, or even by a natural disaster! Although most commonly of all in today’s world, will be loss through you becoming a victim to a malevolent cyber-attack.

You may well take a copy of your data & save it to an external disk or dump a copy in the Cloud, but is that an extensive enough backup to protect your business from complete disaster?

 

Which is the best to apply?

The 3-2-1 Backup rule; an extensive practice to cover nearly all eventualities of data loss and requirement for recovery.

With an easy-to-remember structure for keeping all your private details and company data defended & recoverable should the worst case scenario occur.

At all times, keep at least THREE different copies of your latest data.

You can’t predict data loss, or worse, a cyber-attack. Having at least three independent backup copies of your data helps to best mitigate the risk of loss. One copy being your original file data (on your server/s or cloud storage), with a further two duplicate copies being stored in different locations as your backup sources.

Store TWO backup copies on separate devices or storage media.

Nothing will last a lifetime, (besides plastic). We must all remember that storage devices will suffer a failure at some point in their life, or if they are connected to your network at the point of a cyber-attack striking, may well become infested with malware and will suffer loss too.

Therefore, to maximise peace of mind, you should always have multiple copies on unique devices, and they shouldn’t be the same type of device, with slim odds of corrupting at the same time.

Keep at least ONE backup copy off-site.

A simple, yet very important rule. If you follow the first two rules, you’re on the right path, but if you don’t have an off-site backup, you’re not completely defended.

You’ve undoubtedly guessed why, if your external hard drives, disks or cloud storage are all connected to your system, whilst it corrupts, or gets attacked, it’s all infected & your multiple points of recovery are lost in one fell swoop.

Whereas if you’ve got a copy offsite, you will still have a safe recovery point to restore your critical systems and retrieve all your information should all else fail.

 

Why follow this, 3-2-1 rule?

Given the huge rise in Cyber-attacks, with Ransomware hitting businesses left, right and centre, I can’t see any reason you wouldn’t want to protect your critical data?

With people underestimating the likelihood of having a natural disaster, suffering from accidental deletion or corruption, or even the victim of a hacker. The stakes have never been so high, with your business on the line, backup is fundamental to protect livelihoods. Deal with it before it deals with you first.

When applying the 3-2-1 rule, don’t forget to use a robust, trusted solution, which is where we Ontraq, step in.