I'm currently training for system administration at a trade school, and I'm a bit confused about the best practices for backups. I've been taught that the ideal strategy includes daily backups stored on different devices for each day of the week, weekly backups on a second set of devices, and monthly backups on a third set that overwrite the previous month. However, a classmate with three years of IT experience claimed that nobody actually follows this method and has implied that his past employers were not very reputable. I'm looking for insight from professionals on how backups are really handled in businesses with around 20-100 employees—Is this 'gold standard' approach what most companies actually do? Any advice or experiences would be really helpful!
6 Answers
The 3-2-2 rule is a good guideline to follow. Your school's method seems outdated. Perhaps consult on the 3-2-1 method too? You may find that best practices have evolved beyond what was taught in class.
Backups these days typically go to large file servers often set up with RAID. The 'gold standard,' as you might call it, is using immutable storage with a defined retention policy, often replicated across various physical locations. The differential backups we do leverage data compression to keep storage costs down, rather than using separate hard drives for each backup.
For our company, we do full and incremental backups for 90 days on SAN1, and we have a disaster recovery site (SAN2) that follows a GFS strategy. We retain backups longer for compliance, with some going back three years! This method keeps our data safe and ensures we can recover effectively.
No one-size-fits-all approach exists for backups. There's a balancing act of ensuring data is retrievable as quickly as possible against the need for legal compliance and data audit trails. It's not just about creating a heap of backups; it's about having a solid disaster recovery plan.
Totally get that! Plus, I’ve heard those tales about major mishaps when companies don’t have an adequate backup strategy ingrained.
Thanks everyone! I've learned so much already! It's all about that 'immutable storage' concept—definitely a term I need to dive deeper into since it hasn't been covered fully in my training so far.
It really depends on the industry since each has its unique data retention policies, especially in the EU. Backups are crucial, but the frequency and storage methods can vary widely based on business needs.
Absolutely! Legal requirements can drive backup decisions, so there’s definitely a lot of flexibility in how companies manage this.
I thought I heard of the 3-2-1 rule! Is 3-2-2 just an update or something?