Backup 3,2,1 - what is it and why will it save your data?

Like everyone, surely you have ever lost all or some of the most important files that you had on your hard drive due to a failure of it or to having had to format Windows due to some fatal problem. If we had backup system 3, 2, 1 this would never happen, since it is the best way to protect yourself against disasters.

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Today we will explain what is this type of storage strategy to never lose data, and we will also give some useful stories about how to do it easily and without paying anything or at least not too much.

What is a 3, 2, 1 backup and what will it do

Like many other non-mandatory and unwritten rules in computing, this is a very interesting and important one especially for those who, like me, are somewhat absent-minded and not proactive in these matters.

A 3, 2, 1 backup is basically a strategy to ensure the replication of your data in an orderly way against disasters. Basically it is about making 3 copies of your data, storing on at least two different media and sending one of these copies to a different physical location.

It is certainly a tough challenge for those especially lazy, but with just a few minutes and without investing money, we will be assured of at least one copy if something happens to our PC, mobile phone or anything else. We will explain it in more detail giving you ideas on how to do the procedure.

First: back up 3 data

The ideal in this rule is to have at least 3 backup copies of your data. And if you also work with sensitive content whose loss would be disastrous, it would be recommended that these three copies be made manually or automatically every day or every week.

By probability, sooner or later a hard drive that we have bought will die, either because it is old, or because of a problem with the current or because we ourselves have accidentally deleted the data. The more copies of files we have, the more difficult it will be to lose them, it is obvious, of course, the best thing is that they are on different media. It is unlikely that our "Shift Delete" will take all three cups made at once, or that two or three hard drives fail at the same time.

But of course, this is quite annoying if we have to do it manually, so there are programs like Acronis True Image, EaseUS, iDrive or Paragon that will make these copies automatically if we configure them like this.

Second: 2 of these copies keep them on different media

Once we have the way to make the three backups, now it is time to store them on different devices, for now we are not talking about sending them to the other end of the world, simply using two hard drives or two physically different units where to store each copy. Don't cheat, having two partitions doesn't protect you from a drive failure, or even formatting for the clueless.

And a hard drive has an average time to failure (MTTF) of 1 million hours, storing copies in two units doubles the integrity to 2 million hours, and so on. But of course, the ideal in this case is to avoid having these two or three units connected to the same power supply or to the same system, since a cascade failure could occur, for example due to a power surge.

In this fucking we can use a lot of storage media, such as a second disk if we are in a bad budget, a USB flash drive, CD-ROM, or much better, a NAS or network drives, or cloud storage.

Third: at least 1 copy put it in a different physical place

They say that lightning does not strike twice in the same place, although there are always people more prone to bad luck. Therefore, the ideal will be that at least one of the 1, 2, 3 backups we make is located in a different physical location.

We are not talking about taking your flash drive and putting it in a drawer on the table, since possibly the lightning strike from your PC could also affect the USB or CD-ROM. So it would be best to send this third copy away from us, as far as if it were in the cloud.

Cloud storage consists of storage servers connected to the Internet where each user can access from anywhere with a username and password. Those systems have technical support and disk arrays behind RAID that offer the maximum guarantees of data integrity to the user. Even if you don't know, you already have at least a free cloud of several GB for you. How? Well, just by having an account with Google (Google Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive) or Apple (iCloud). That is the ideal physical location for this third copy.

Possible ideas on how to create a backup 3, 2, 1

Here we leave you some ideas of how to create this system of copies 3, 2, 1, each one of them will need a different infrastructure and possibly requires spending a little money to buy storage units.

Free method 3, 2, 1

The easiest way possible to make this copy plan without spending a single euro is to use

• 1: a second hard drive 2: a USB drive 3: cloud storage integrated in our Microsoft, Google or Apple account, or even two if we do not have any more hard drives

Almost all of us have a USB or buying a relatively worthy one is not worth more than 7 euros. We also all have a Smartphone, so we have 15 GB free on Google Drive, and a Microsoft account to register with Windows, so we would have another 10 GB extra in this cloud.

With this we already have everything we need, 3 different media, including two of them located geographically in a different place. It would be like a 3, 2, 2 right?

We could even download a program like EaseUS Todo Backup Free with which we can automate our backups on different platforms, since it detects any USB drive, and can be integrated with cloud storage as we see in the previous screenshots.

It is a 100% recommended method for those who wish to copy their files from time to time and ensure their permanence.

Backup 3, 2, 1 with a NAS

This way already implies having to buy a NAS if our scope is reduced to the domestic, or small business. But the great advantage of a NAS is that it not only makes network backups automatically, but its operating system gives us an incredible amount of extra options. To this we add the fact of having a RAID of mounted disks that in turn protects the files with AES 256 bit hardware encryption and replication.

So our 3, 2, 1 could be in this case:

• 1: USB drive or a first company NAS 2: a second remote home NAS 3: single or dual cloud storage as before

It is possible that the company where we work already has a NAS or a copy system, if we add a NAS of our own we would have a remote repository. NAS are expensive equipment, making it a user-oriented system that handles large amounts of sensitive data such as work desks, SMEs, or just hobbyists.

For us, who work in this field of communication media, it is the most ideal structure possible, since this way we achieve high file replication on a NAS with RAID 5, have content in the cloud and also have fast access storage units for our test benches. A basic two-bay NAS costs about € 120 more than the cost of hard drives, but it really offers much more than just copies.

How will you mount your backup system 3, 2, 1?

You see that understanding this copy rule is quite simple, and that it is possible to modify it as we want and according to our possibilities.

With the large number of services that the Internet gives us today it would be rare for a user to be unable to meet all three requirements. Since we always have extra hard drives, USB and cloud storage. They are two good methods and also safe, although if we opted for one, it would be to use a NAS, since with them we can do great things.

So we leave some interesting tutorials on this topic here:

How will you propose the 3, 2, 1 system? Do you have any other interesting ideas to build a free and simple 3.2 1?