Most people either know someone or themselves have had the experience of losing data. If you consider how many individuals and businesses have hardware that gets lost or stolen each year, the number is startling and steps to avoid this are simple.

With so many cases of lost or stolen data, many would think precautions against it and basic knowledge and practice would be well known but still many individuals and businesses do not take advantage of even basic security practice, such as a backup strategy that includes cloud backup.

It’s imperative to have a backup strategy and to choose an approach that will cover you on many levels. We highly recommend the “3-2-1 strategy”, meaning you have at least three total copies of your data; two of which are local but on different mediums (ie. laptop and external hard drive) and at least one copy offsite.

For example:

1st copy: An image that you have on your home PC desktop or laptop called “Mexico.jpg” from a recent holiday. This is one copy of the data.

2nd copy: An external hard drive used for backing up your PC desktop or laptop. If you using a Mac, you will likely use it as a Time Machine drive. As part of its backup process, the external hard drive will back up “Mexico.jpg”. That’s the second copy, on a separate device.

3rd copy: In addition to the copy on your PC desktop or laptop and external hard drive, there is also an online solution called cloud backup. The online cloud backup will continuously scan your PC or laptop and upload your data offsite to a data centre. “Mexico.jpg” is included in this upload, and this is the third copy of your data.

While an onsite backup solution is essential, an offsite backup solution is a vital piece in completing your backup strategy. Having a backup near the device that it’s backing up, ie. your PC or laptop and external hard drive on the same desk, puts you at risk of losing both in the unfortunate event of a flood, fire, or theft where most likely both devices will be affected.

The 3-2-1 backup approach is a great start for protecting your data, with the ultimate aim of data backup is to find as many ways as possible to limit exposure should the worst happen. Cloud backup ensures that you have a copy of your data secure and continuously updated in an offsite location should something happen to your onsite systems, ie. PC desktop, laptop or external hard drive.

Having a local backup and an offsite backup gives you more options for backup recovery, which is always a positive. For more information about different backup methods including our Cloud Backup service, please visit directionforward.com/services/backup and get in touch with us at [email protected].