Dusty Bin and the 3-2-1 backup plan

You may (or may not) remember Dusty Bin, who was a character in a hugely popular 80’s game show titled ‘3-2-1’.  He was both the mascot and the booby prize.  As well as being immensely popular with audience figures of 12 million and upwards, the host Ted Rogers and Dusty Bin were also ahead of their time in terms of promoting backup methodologies.  Ted Rogers would frequently make a lightning fast 3-2-1 gesture, which became an important part of the show.  Roll on 40 years later, and ‘3-2-1’ is now considered to be a time honoured best practice approach to data backup as seen below:

3. Create 3 copies of your data (1 primary copy and 2 backups)

2. Store your copies in at least 2 types of storage media (local drive, network share/NAS, tape drive etc)

1. Store 1 of these copies offsite (typically in the cloud)

Following the methodology above, and keeping backup copies both local and offsite reduces your restore times and doubles the protection of your data in the event of a ransomware attack or other disaster. Whilst the cloud has potentially changed this methodology, for small businesses in particular it still serves as a useful starting point and yardstick if you have no formal backup plan.

However, just as important to your business is the frequency of these backups.  We would recommend as a minimum that you backup your data on a daily basis.  If you think losing a day’s worth of data would be unacceptable then you should run multiple backups during the day.

So there you have it, Dusty Bin might have brought joy to millions on a Saturday night in the 80’s, but he has also in all likelihood saved thousands of businesses from going out of existence with his forward thinking backup plan!

If you would like to discuss how we can help your business with strategic IT advice and guidance then please contact us.