A survey of IT professionals by ITdaily found that six in 10 follow the 3-2-1 rule when making backups. Only a quarter also test backups regularly.
Backups are your organization’s last lifeline in an emergency. When a data center goes up in flames or hackers take down your systems, you can limit the damage if you have a good backup to fall back on. As such, there are all sorts of rules of thumb about how many backups to make, how regularly and where they should be, with the 3-2-1 rule being the most well-known.
No IT professional will deny the importance of backups, but are the rules being put into practice? ITdaily conducted an online roundup of organizations’ backup strategies. 72 respondents participated in the roundtable.
3-2-1
What it turns out: the 3-2-1 rule is well known among our readers. Sixty-two percent report making backups following the golden rule. A 3-2-1 strategy means that you have at least three versions of your backups, on at least two different media, with at least one copy in a remote location.
16 percent trust backups entirely to the cloud, 12 percent prefer a local storage device such as a NAS. Nine percent of participants are unaware of their organization’s backup strategy.
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Testing
So the majority of IT professionals keep good backup habits. Yet an important part is often forgotten: testing. You can have as many backups as you want, if you can’t restore them quickly, they are of little use. 36 percent follow the 3-2-1 rule, but do not test the backups. Only 25 percent follow the rule and do regularly test whether backups are working.
Every month we poll our readers on a current technology topic. Curious about the results of previous polls? Here find the overview.