March 30 is World Backup Day. No, you don’t get a day off. It is an initiative supported by some of the providers we have in our Cloud backup guide like Mega and Backblaze, and even Amazon, which everyone asks – individuals? Organizations? – to make at least one backup of their precious data.
At Ny Breaking we believe, and perhaps you too, the reader, that any person or company that refuses to admit the mortality of his or her person external hard drives And SSDs is possibly (certainly) from another planet. 2021 Backblaze data shows that 21% of people have never backed up.
This makes me cry, and so it is up to me to try to turn the tide. You can be the most careful person in the world, but your serve will still fail eventually. The mechanical platters of a hard drive are more susceptible to failure than those of a solid-state drive because, as the name suggests, it has no moving parts.
So you can buy any combination of these until the end of time for an on-premise backup solution, but this comes with four problems: 1) the cost, 2) the enormous amount of space this takes up when you start with placing those driving inside servers and 3) the relative lack of security of a purely local storage configuration.
The 3-2-1 backup principle
Yes, for truly secure, preserved data, keeping all your storage devices in one location isn’t enough. The 3-2-1 backup principleRevered by big names like IONOS and Seagate, it suggests that you should have three copies of all your data at once at all times, on two different types of media, and that one of these backups should be kept off-site.
And because data is truly mortal, replace those backups and the kind of media and devices you keep them on forever, and you’ll love it because you value your data, right? This maintenance is one of the tedious things when doing on-site backups.
The principle is decades old and so worn out that even we have published authors claiming so 3-2-1 backups are outdated due to the existence of the cloud that is driving the obsolescence of the old tape media and compact discs – the things that immediately come to mind when you think of different types of storage.
Yeah right. But that brings us to another major drawback to on-premise backups, which is that: If your company has the luxury of a second location between which backups can be split, that’s fine, but if you’re committed to 3- 2-1 , responsible data storage and the circumstances mean you don’t have that luxury, how exactly do you make an off-site backup?
This was a mystery in ancient times, but in the twenty-first century I’d say cloud backups are a good fit for 3-2-1, no matter what the naysayers think.
Cloud backup and security
Cloud backup involves entrusting your data to another company’s servers, usually in a data center somewhere, and paying a monthly or annual fee. This may make financial sense in the short to medium term, or even beyond lifetime cloud storage plans, which offer much the same thing, but for a hefty one-time fee.
The other big advantage of cloud backups is that they solve the problem of where you keep your off-site backup, because you’ve handed control of it over to another anonymous company, which will have its own data loss prevention strategies, and backup -ups of your backup.
However, involving another company can be both a blessing and a curse: we realize that transferring your data, which could be sensitive customer data, to another company’s servers may seem like a bad idea.
To avoid that, some of our recommended providers, such as pCloud, MEGAAnd Ice rideoffer end-to-end encryption, also called zero-knowledge or client-side encryption, which means the company managing your storage has no access to your files or the ability to view their metadata.
It’s a nice certainty in an age of justified fear about how humanity can abuse the internet, and also a very recent phenomenon that many household names have only just begun to take note of. For example, Google Drive only allows end-to-end encryption for Google Workspace accounts of organizations whose administrators have enabled it.
Solo professionals who want to use Google Drive will have to rely on server-side encryption – which may protect your files from Google Towers hacking by clumsy people, but not from Google itself or anyone with unauthorized access to your account.
Google Drive also happens to be, for us and even for your money, one of the cheapest cloud backup providers, so that might be something to keep in mind.
Cloud storage vs backup
Another thing to think about is that Google’s offering, for example, is also known by many as a cloud storage provider, but that’s not quite the same as a cloud backup provider.
If a service ideally lets you back up an entire drive, but at least a single folder on a device to the cloud, then that’s what you want in this context. Cloud storage, meanwhile, is focused on keeping copies of specific files, not entire drives, and not all cloud storage services offer cloud backups.
Back it up, wrap it up
I wish I had a deeper, less pointed argument for backing up your data at all – I don’t. Do you like having your stuff? Well then. But I do think the argument for cloud backup, not just during this momentous March, but in general, is strong and clear.
Cloud backups alleviate, if not completely, many of the obstacles posed by the 3-2-1 strategy, and the industry has advanced enough that providers that aren’t Google, Amazon, or Microsoft are popping up left right and center , if that is a consideration.
We can make recommendations for cloud backup providers, but the choice is ultimately yours. Please read provider websites to understand what features are offered and whether a particular service is fit for purpose before making a purchase. Because, as with any business decision, it is important to do proper research.