How Your Small Business Can Use The 3-2-1 Backup Solution
Why Follow The 3-2-1 Backup Solution?
41% of small business have an emergency back up plan. Backing up your small business data is an investment that keeps your business running for years to come. You know how frustrating it can be to loose a report, a piece of code, a spreadsheet, or any other document you’ve been working on for an hour. Now instead of loosing an hour of work you loose a week, a month or even a year worth of your work. Would your business be able to survive remaking all of that data? Most can’t, in fact 93% of businesses go bankrupt after 10-days of data loss. This is why having an up-to date, easy to deploy, backing up plan is important. One way your business can help protect it’s data is the 3-2-1 backup solution.
What is the 3-2-1 Backup Solution?
The 3-2-1 backup solution is a common guideline for data back up.
- 3 copies of your data.
- Two different types forms of back up
- You want 1 copy store offsite
How To Follow The 3-2-1 Backup Solution
Following the 3-2-1 Backup solution is simple. The first thing you have to determine is how you want to back up your data.
There are 3 common forms you can use to backup your data.
External Hard Drives
Pros
External hard drives are a great option because they are cheaper, and portable. You can easily order a external hard drive offline or pick one up at the store for $50-$200 depending on the brand and storage size. The small compact size makes it easy to travel with, and doesn’t take up much space on the counter.
Cons
External hard drives do have some downsides to them. You have to plug in your hard drive in order to back up your data and files. If you’re traveling for work or use a laptop you can forget to plug in your hard drive to back up your files. Just like any other piece of technology they need to be replaced after so many years. External hard drives also can become corrupt making it so you can’t recover all of your data and files.
CD’s, Blue Ray’s, Tape’s
Pros
CD’s, Blue Ray’s and tape’s capture the data at the time it was put on a the disk or tape. Because the disk or tape is a physical copy if an virus infected your business it can’t rewrite that data. You can also store the data on premises or off premises.
Cons
There are a couple different problem to this method. Disks and tapes can break and scratch, and be rewritten over. It’s hard to keep a current copy of your small business data and files. Lastly you have to find somewhere to store all of your tapes and disks.
Cloud Backup
Pros
The three best parts of cloud back up are automatic back ups, access to your files from many different locations, and it’s offsite. You can set up the cloud to atomically backup your data. That way you don’t have to worry or put data backup on your to-do list. Depending on your provider you can access you files at multiple different locations. This makes seeing your files when traveling or working remotely simple, easy, and fast. Lastly your data isn’t stored onsite. If something happened to your small businesses physical location you will still have you data and files backed up.
Cons
Most cloud backups only work when your connected to the internet. Also because your data is being sent to the cloud there is a possibility of being hacked. That could lead to compromised security if you or the cloud backup service doesn’t encrypt your data.
Using the 3-2-1 solution you need to pick two of ways to back up your data. You need to careful decide what combination works best for you, external hard drives, Cd’s, Blue Ray’s, Tape’s or Cloud Back Up. Whatever combination you choose one of them has to be stored off site. You also need to make sure you have 3 copies of your data and files.
Do You Want Help With You Back Up Plan?
If you want help coming up with a back up and recovery plan that best fits your business contact us. We will be more than happy to help you figure out what plan best fits your business. We also have a safe data backup service called full cloud server backups.
