March 30 is World Backup Day. No, you don't have the day off. It is an initiative supported by some of the suppliers that we recommend in our cloud backup guides like Mega and Backblaze, and even Amazon, asking everyone: individuals? Organizations? – make at least one backup of your valuable data.
At TechRadar Pro, we, and perhaps you too, the reader, believe that any person or company that refuses to admit the mortality of their External hard drives and SSD He is possibly (definitely) from another planet. Backblaze data from 2021 suggests that 21% of people have never taken a backup.
This makes me cry, and so it's up to me to try to change course. You can be the most careful person in the world, but your storage will eventually fail. The mechanical platters of a hard drive are more prone to failure than those of a solid-state drive because, as its name implies, the latter has no moving parts.
So you can buy any combination of these until the end of time for a local backup solution, but this raises four problems: 1) the expense, 2) the large amount of space it will take up if you start putting those drives in servers and 3) the relative lack of security of a purely local storage setup.
The 3-2-1 backup principle
Yes, for truly secure and preserved data, it's not enough to keep all your storage devices in one place. The 3-2-1 backup principleRevered by such big names as IONOS and Seagate, it suggests that at all times you should have three copies of all your data at once, on two different types of media, and one of these backups should be kept off-site. .
And, because data is truly deadly, you will replace these backups and the types of media and devices you save them on forever, and you will love it, because you value your data, right? This maintenance is one of the tiring things about local backups.
The principle is decades old and well worn to the point that even we have published contributors claiming that 3-2-1 backups are out of date due to the existence of the cloud causing the obsolescence of old tapes and compact discs, things that immediately come to mind when thinking about different types of storage.
Well, sure. But that brings us to another of the big disadvantages of local backups, which is: if your company has the luxury of a second site to split backups, that's fine, but if you're committed to 3-2- 1, responsible data preservation and circumstances mean you don't have that luxury, how exactly do you do an off-site backup?
In ancient times, this was an enigma, but in the 21st century, I'd say cloud backups can accommodate 3-2-1, no matter what the naysayers think.
Cloud Backup and Security
Cloud backup involves trusting your data to another company's servers, usually in a data center somewhere, and paying a monthly or annual fee for the privilege. In the short and medium term, this may make financial sense, or even further with lifetime cloud storage plans, which offer virtually 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 to store the backup off-site, because you have given up control over it to another anonymous company, which will have its own data loss prevention strategies. data and backup copies of your backup.
However, involving another company can be a blessing and a curse: we recognize that handing over your data, which may be sensitive customer data, to another company's servers may seem like, well, a bad idea.
Well, to avoid this, several of our recommended providers, such as pCloud, MEGAand ice unitThey offer end-to-end encryption, sometimes 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 your metadata.
It's a good security in a time of well-justified fears about how humanity may abuse the Internet, and it's also a very recent phenomenon that many household names have only just begun to take note of. Google Drive, for example, only allows end-to-end encryption for Google Workspace accounts that belong to organizations whose administrators have enabled it.
Solo professionals who want to use Google Drive will have to rely on server-side encryption, which might protect your files from hacks by useless people at Google Towers, but not from Google or anyone with unauthorized access to your account.
Google Drive is also, for our money and yours, one of the cheapest cloud backup providers, so that may be something to consider.
Cloud Storage Versus 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 is not the same as a cloud backup provider.
If a service ideally allows you to backup an entire drive but at least a single folder on a cloud device, that's what you want in this context. Meanwhile, cloud storage focuses on maintaining 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 sarcastic argument to make for backing up your data; I don't have it. Do you like having your things? Well then. But I do think the argument for cloud backup, not just during this momentous month of March but in general, is loud and clear.
Cloud backups alleviate, if not completely eliminate, many of the obstacles presented by the 3-2-1 strategy, and the industry is advanced enough that providers other than Google, Amazon or Microsoft are emerging left, right and center, if that's a consideration.
We can offer recommendations for cloud backup providers, but ultimately the choice is yours. Read providers' websites to understand what features they offer and whether any service is suitable before purchasing because, as with any business decision, it's important to do your research.
