Planning for a disaster can be a difficult task. Of course nobody wants to think about all the terrible things that could happen and on top of that, it’s near impossible to account for every possible thing. Unfortunately, it’s important to have a strong backup and disaster recovery/business continuity plan in place should something occur.
When we design backup and disaster recovery solutions for our clients, we have to consider certain factors: internal system failures or viruses, threats from the nearby physical environments, and possible larger disasters like tornadoes or fires. That’s why we follow the 3-2-1 rule.
At Least Three Copies
That means your data should be backed up and saved in three different places, and not just in different folders on the same drive: the source machine, your backup device and possibly the cloud (for example).
Two Types of Formats
In other words, you have to use two separate methods to store your data. One might be saving to a disk and the other being an external drive.
One Offsite
At least one copy of your backup data should be stored offsite. At Mirazon we have a solution that is a hybrid-cloud model so one backup is safe and offsite automatically.
However, that is a basic rule just for the storage of your backup data. Business continuity encompasses so much more than that and virtualization is becoming a more common methodology. The experts at Datto Backup recommend: three sites for backup (source machine, backup device and the cloud), two types of virtualization (both local and offsite) and one test virtualization of the backups each day.
The key to all this is protecting your data from being lost while also ensuring you can get up and running fast in the event of a disaster. If a fire wipes out your entire building, you have to still be able to access your mission-critical data and business functions to get back to business. That means documenting the process for accessing the backups that were stored offsite and being able to access and use those backups.