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Servers & backup

What is 3-2-1 rule?

3 copies, on 2 different types of media, 1 off-site — a simple, reliable backup rule.

Also: 3-2-1 backup

The 3-2-1 rule means: 3 copies of your data (the original plus two backups), on 2 different types of media (e.g. a NAS and the cloud), with 1 copy in another physical location.

This way a single incident — fire, theft, disk failure or ransomware — can’t damage every copy at once. Today one more condition is often added: one copy should be offline or immutable.

Example

The original is on the office server, a copy on a NAS and another copy in the cloud that can’t be deleted from the network.

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