3-2-1 Backup Strategy - What it means & how to achieve it

Backup administrators are often tasked with creating a reliable backup of organizational workload and data. There are several backup best practices that the data managers must follow to keep their backups safe and secure.

They need to have a well-defined backup strategy like 3-2-1 Backup Strategy, along with that they must have a backup and disaster recovery plan.

The most modern solution for an off-site copy of data is having cloud data storage and disaster recovery solutions. Backup for disaster recovery is necessary for business continuity.

Here is the explanation of the 3-2-1 backup strategy:

Three copies of the important data

This strategy focuses on data redundancy which is important for disaster recovery and business continuity planning as well as data security compliance. The data managers or administrators must make at least three copies of data that are the first step in this strategy. The copies have to be current and must include an original copy along with two more copies.

Two different durable storage media

The second step here is storage and the two copies have to be stored on two different media. Making sure that the storage media used are durable if the data has to increase in future then the media have to be scalable as well. The data types also matter a lot; with tiered storage, this can be easily tackled with.

One copy of data off premises

One of the copy has to be off-premises to make sure that on-premises disasters do not affect the third copy. Cloud is perfect modern DR site because of its agility, durability, security and recovery time as well.

Once again the solutions in place for should complement the risk-free 3-2-1 strategy. Organizations should use cloud-agnostic backup, storage and gateway solutions like stonefly gateway that can be configured to support multiple public clouds. So you can have multiple cloud backups as well. Microsoft cloud backup can be used for data backups.

Conclusion

To minimize the risk of losing data many organizations introduce data redundancy. The 3-2-1 backup rule is the best practice IT administrators follow this makes the backup more reliable.

Using durable storage solutions has to be another priority for organizations. For cloud backup and archiving, organizations can use storage gateways that support hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This complements the 3-2-1 backup strategy for cloud data storage and backup.