Backups part 4: best practices

Posted by - Ninja Johnny
On - 11 augustus 2020

Backup blog series table of contents

In the concluding part of this series, we will go over the best practices incorporated into a backup strategy. Ideally, you’ll always have at least one copy at hand of your data. There will always be that one moment that that copy might come into handy, for example when your computer crashed or your SSD/HDD became faulty. It’s even better to keep more than one copy. A known strategy states that at least 3 copies of data should be kept: 2 local backups and one backup that is kept off-site.

This simple yet effective method of keeping at least 3 copies of data is called the “3-2-1 backup strategy”. 2 local copies should be made on 2 different media. These copies will be stored locally. The third copy is stored offsite or on a remote place. This method will leave you 3 different ways to solve an issue related to your data. The fastest way to restore compromised data would be the use of the local copies. The offsite copy should not be too far away, yet still far enough that it cannot be compromised by a problem in the production environment.

In most cases, 3 backups is more than sufficient. A higher amount would mean it would take more time to manage these backups and it would also require more storage for the backups. It actually just boils down to finding the balance between just enough backups to be safe and a number that assures that managing that number won’t be too time consuming.

The backup frequency is something that should be taken into consideration when developing a backup plan. It’s a must in any kind of backup strategy. One could do this with manual backups, which eventually would mean a lot of work needs to happen. The human factor is however a liability, as you can never be sure that a person that is commissioned with taking the backups might forget or skip some moments. Therefore automated backup would be the better solution for a long term backup strategy. Automated backups allow backups to run monthly, weekly, daily or even hourly, depending on what you exactly need. Next to the frequency, another thing is how long a backup will be stored before it will be deleted. Usually this gets the defined by the maximum copies that will be kept of a certain backup. For example: you have a location on your computer that gets a backup once a week, but you also decide to keep 5 backups at most of that location. That means, a backup will be kept at least 5 weeks before it gets deleted (unless you decide to keep it for a particular reason).

To develop a backup strategy plan, you can always start with asking the following questions: