The Rule of Three

In this video, we go over why we need to back up three times. Now, in the last video, the prime example was Florida city was going to pay hackers $600,000 to recover their data from a ransomware attack. Now, I’m guessing they didn’t follow the rule of three when it came to data backup. If they did, they would most likely be able to recover from this type of attack. And this is why the rule of three is very important when it comes to data backup. So if you’re not familiar with the rule of three, it’s simply to have at least three copies of your data. Store your data on two different media types, and keep at least one copy off-site.

So pretty simple rules. Let’s go for the why. So having at least three copies of our data creates less of a risk and less of a gamble. After all, even though we back up our data once, something could potentially happen to it. Back it up twice, well, you lowered your risk. But again, something could happen to those two copies. So hard drives fail. Tapes become demagnetized, SSD controllers fail, technology becomes obsolete.

That’s why we should have, at least, our data backups on at least two different types of media types. Ransomware attacks encrypt our on-site backup. If that happens, now you can’t access your files. So this is why having an off-site backup is so important. You could still have an on-premise solution, which I do recommend, because depending on how large your data set is, having an off-site backup may take a lot longer to recover your network than you’re particularly comfortable with, or can particularly afford. So having an on-site backup is great. But again, if you get a ransomware attack, your file system’s probably going to get encrypted as well. That’s why you want to have at least one off-site backup.

And when it comes to data backup, you have a lot of different things that you can do. Now, on smaller networks of individuals, you could do something as simple as a DVD drive, a USB drive, external drive. If you have a larger data set, you could do things like a NAS drive, which is basically a hardware device. It has several different hard drives in there. It has redundancy. And they range between about $170 to $1,000, a couple thousand, depending on how big of a rig you get, how sophisticated it is. But these are generally good for individuals or small businesses.

When we get into large businesses, we’re going to be taking a look at larger hardware solutions that will potentially back up your data. Now, off-site backups are also important because bad things do happen– office fires, flood, catastrophic failure. Having off-site backup would allow us to recover if something catastrophic happened to our network physically. Now, wrapping up, have at least three copies of your data. Always keep at least three copies of your critical data. Store your data on two different media types. Media can become inoperable or obsolete. Keep at least one copy off site. Disaster could strike. Be sure to have at least one copy of your data off site. So this was about the rule of three.

In the next video, we’re going to take a deeper understanding about backup methods. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.