The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy: Your Ultimate Shield Against Data Loss

In a recent incident, UniSuper and Google Cloud faced a significant data disruption where an inadvertent misconfiguration led to the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services, affecting their entire infrastructure across multiple geographies. This situation underscores the critical need for robust backup strategies.

What Happened?

UniSuper experienced a major service disruption due to a misconfiguration during the provisioning of their Private Cloud services, resulting in data loss across both geographic locations where their services were duplicated. This led to an extensive recovery effort involving hundreds of virtual machines, databases, and applications

How the 3-2-1 Strategy Could Help

The 3-2-1 backup strategy involves:

• 3 Copies of Your Data: Keep the original data plus two backups.
• 2 Different Storage Media: Use two different types of storage to reduce the risk of simultaneous failure.
• 1 Offsite Copy: Store one backup offsite to protect against local disasters

Example: Protecting Your Business Data

Imagine you run a small marketing agency and use Google Drive for all your project files. To implement the 3-2-1 strategy:

1. Original Data: Store on Google Drive.
2. First Backup: Regularly back up your Google Drive files to an external hard drive.
3. Second Backup: Use a different cloud service, like Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive, to store another backup.
4. Offsite Copy: Ensure one backup is stored offsite. This could be the second cloud backup or an external hard drive kept at a different location, like your home office.

Benefits in Case of an Incident

Redundancy: With three copies of your data, the loss of one copy (like what happened with Google Drive) doesn’t mean a total data loss.

Diversified Risks: By using different storage media, you mitigate the risk of all backups failing simultaneously.

Disaster Recovery: An offsite backup ensures that even if a local disaster affects your primary and first backup locations, you can still recover your data.

Conclusion

The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a simple yet powerful method to protect against data loss. Incidents like the recent UniSuper and Google Cloud data loss highlight the necessity of having multiple, diversified backups. Implementing this strategy can save you from significant disruptions and ensure your data’s safety and availability.

What backup strategy does your organization follow to ensure data safety and availability?