

You may need two different clouds to provide two independent storage media.įor that reason, avoid backup software that allows you to upload data to only one specific cloud and thus locks you in a single provider without the ability to use cheaper or more efficient cloud storage. In many cases, being able to use more than one cloud storage solution at once is important for meeting the 3-2-1 backup rule.

However, there are also several newer cloud storage providers, such as BackBlaze B2 and Wasabi Hot Storage, that offer compelling prices and feature sets.īe sure to evaluate the different cloud storage options available to you in order to choose which solution is best as part of your 3-2-1 backup strategy. Well-established options include the storage services from the “Big Three” cloud providers: Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage. There is a range of cloud storage solutions available today which can be used for 3-2-1 backup strategy implementation. In each of these ways, cloud storage helps meet the different parts of the 3-2-1 backup rule.
#3 2 1 backup methodology professional#
Scalability. Whether you can run out of space with your local backup storage, most professional cloud storage solutions don't have a limitation for the amount of data you upload.Or, if your production data lives natively in the cloud, you can easily use geo-replication to store a second copy of that data in another cloud region, which satisfies the offsite storage requirement of 3-2-1 backup rule. If your production data is in a local data center, the cloud is an easy way to create an offsite storage solution. This makes it easy to maintain at least two independent storage media.

Any data stored in the cloud is independent of data stored on local disks or the local network.

Second, at least two of the copies of your data should exist on storage devices that are physically independent of each other. To define how often you should backup your production data to comply with your business needs, check out recovery time and recovery point objective concepts. This is an ideal way to perform a 3-2-1 backup which is, to an extent, impossible when talking about big production datasets. (Creating data backups from multiple points in time is often a good idea, but it’s not part of the 3-2-1 backup rule.) All copies need to contain the same data from the same point in time. In other words, you don’t satisfy this rule if you have one copy of data from a backup that you performed yesterday and two other copies that were created last week. The other two copies are backups.Įach copy of the data - the production copy and the two backups - should be stored and configured in such a way that it will remain intact even if the other copies fail or disappear.įinally, each of these copies should contain the same version of the data. One copy is the production data (i.e., the original data that you use for real-world) purposes. First, following the 3-2-1 backup strategy means that you should always have at least three distinct copies of your data.
