A single hard drive failure can destroy years of work. The 3-2-1 strategy can save you from going under.
What is the 3-2-1 strategy?
- 3 copies of your data (the original plus 2 copies)
- 2 different types of media (local plus cloud)
- 1 copy off site (a remote location)
Why backups fail
- They are never tested (40% of cases)
- Copies sit in the same physical place (30%)
- There is only one backup (20%)
- Backups are stale or corrupt (10%)
Backup types by company size
Small company (1–10 employees)
- Google Drive/OneDrive for documents
- Automatic weekly backup to an external drive
- Monthly copy stored off site
- Cost: €50–100/month
Medium company (11–50 employees)
- NAS in the office with RAID
- Daily backup to the cloud
- Backup server at a second location
- Cost: €200–500/month
Large company (50+ employees)
- An enterprise backup system
- Real-time replication
- A secondary data centre
- Cost: €1,000–5,000/month
Backup frequency by data type
Critical (hourly)
- Customer database
- Invoicing systems
- Configuration files
Important (daily)
- Working documents
- Corporate email
- Source code
Normal (weekly)
- Media files
- Archived documents
- System logs
Recommended tools
For small companies
- Carbonite Safe: automatic cloud backup
- Acronis Cyber Backup: complete and straightforward
- Backblaze Business: affordable and reliable
For medium companies
- Veeam Backup: the industry standard
- Commvault: enterprise management
- Rubrik: a modernised take on backup
For large companies
- IBM Spectrum Protect: enterprise grade
- Dell EMC Data Protection: full integration
- Veritas NetBackup: maximum scalability
Disaster recovery plan
RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
- Critical: 1–4 hours
- Important: 4–24 hours
- Normal: 24–72 hours
RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
- Critical: 15 minutes
- Important: 1 hour
- Normal: 24 hours
Recovery procedure
- Assess the incident (15 min)
- Activate the plan (30 min)
- Recover critical systems (1–4 hours)
- Verify integrity (1–2 hours)
- Resume operations (varies)
Recovery testing
Monthly: restore random files Quarterly: a full recovery drill Annually: a complete disaster recovery test
Legal compliance
- GDPR: backing up personal data is mandatory
- SOX: 7-year retention for financial data
- HIPAA: encrypted backup for medical data
A business backup checklist
✅ A complete inventory of critical data ✅ Classification by importance ✅ RTO/RPO defined per system ✅ Tools selected ✅ The 3-2-1 strategy implemented ✅ Backups encrypted ✅ Recovery tested regularly ✅ Procedures documented ✅ The IT team trained ✅ Annual review of the strategy
Signs your backup needs work
- You have not tested a recovery in 6+ months
- You only have one copy of your data
- The backup lives in the same building
- Restoring takes you more than 4 hours
- The process is not documented anywhere
- The team does not know how to recover data