Backup easy as 1 2 3

This article is mostly for home users. Businesses should review their company backup policies compliance with their internal IT team or IT vendor.

Since storage has become unexpansive, you have many options at your disposal to back up your data.  So the 3 – 2 – 1 rule is easy to apply. We will briefly explain the rule and we will also give you some of our favorite approaches.  We are not here to compare products but simply tell you what we think has worked best for our teams and clients.

• Backup Rule
• Mobile backup (Photos)
• Computer backup (Home)

Backup rule: 3-2-1

The best practice for backup and the most accepted is the three-two-one rule. It can be explained as:

• Three copies (at least)

• Three copies mean you should have three different copies in different places.

• Your main and active data folders should be in 3 different places (same hard drive if necessary) to reduce the risk of a single event destroying multiple copies
• When actively working on a file, name the files according to its version.
• Two different methods
• Backup on two different format.
• i.e. External Disk, NAS, Time Machine AND/OR OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, Cloud Backup AND/OR DVDs
• One of the copies should be off-site.
• OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud could do the trick to have an offsite version but they do not have retention
• Purchase a cloud backup package. Many unexpansive opinions are available.

Mobile backup:

Many of us started  using Google photos with unlimited space to back up our videos and images.  It works on both iOS and Android.  It’s a very easy application and it will store all of your pictures and videos in your Google photo account.  What’s great is that you can keep deleting photos and videos from your mobile phone to clear space but they will still be in your Google Photo cloud account.  Just make sure the application syncs before deleting any content from your mobile device.  Even if you have other photos/videos on other devices, they can also sync with the same account.  And now you’ll have one central location for all of your photos and videos backed up for free.

Computer backup (Home)

Backup software is important. You can use windows backup and set it up to back up to your external disk every day or weekly.  But we have been using Veeam Endpoint Backup. It is free and very simple to use.  It been doing a great job for us.