To be clear: It’s not enough to have a backup strategy in place. Read more: Top Cyber Security Threats to Organizations Is Having a Backup Strategy Enough? Therefore, the third copy of your data must be stored seperately, in a safe place that won’t be affected if your local or cloud storage gets hacked, fails, or experiences a physical disaster like a fire or flood. As we’ve seen from recent cyberattacks, data breaches hurt your brand and could you to lose your entire business. On a corporate level, however, these losses are more than just sad. Whether it be a corrupted file or a white paper we forgot to save, losing data can be heartbreaking. Many of us have experienced the heartache of permanently losing data. Read more: Are Air Gapped Networks Secure? Why Are Backups Important? Tape backups are more secure than disk and flash backups because they create an air gap - a barrier between the data and the rest of the network, hosted offsite and not accessible online. Because this cloud backup exists on a separate network, it won’t be affected if your local network is compromised.Īt the enterprise level, creating a tape backup is a more secure way to safeguard sensitive data. A cloud storage service acts as an online backup method, making it the third copy of your picture. So now, in addition to your picture living on your desktop and external drive, you put sunset.jpeg on the cloud. Importantly, you need this data to be accessible in a different way. 1 Offsite CopyĪfter the scare of losing your sunset picture, you decide you need additional backup, so you consider your third backup: a completely different form of media than your computer or external hard drive. If something happens to your desktop the picture is permanently deleted there, you can recover it from the Time Machine drive. Now you have a second copy on a different device, or medium, from the first. As part of the process, your external hard drive will hold the backup of sunset.jpg. Say you add that picture to an external hard drive - if you or your company uses Mac, you might be using the Time Machine drive. It lives on your desktop and represents the first version of your data. Having three copies of the data ensures you can recover from accidents that affect multiple versions.įor this example, let’s use a file named sunset.jpeg, which is a picture of a sunset you took on your last summer vacation. Here’s the framework:Ī sound backup system will always preserve at least three copies or versions of data over different periods in time. A 3-2-1 backup plan puts multiple data preservation concepts into practice. Simply put, a 3-2-1 backup strategy will protect your data against the unforeseeable, whether it be a server crash, cyberattack, or natural disaster.
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Read more: Top Business Continuity Software for 2021 What Is a 3-2-1 Backup Strategy? The often overlooked 3-2-1 backup strategy is a foundational approach that should still be applied today. However, not every company implements a robust enterprise backup strategy, causing billions of dollars worth of lost data.Īs the number of places a person or company can store data increases, one of the best backup strategies is sometimes forgotten.
The importance of having a backup for your files is not a new concept most people would agree that backing up data is crucial.