It is not sufficient to back up your data on one internal hard drive to the other internal drive. You need an external hard drive you can unplug, even if there’s plenty space in your tower for multiple internal hard drives. If a lightning strikes your house and destroys your computer, it’s of no use if your backup drive was physically connected with the computer and got destroyed together with the original data. They have to be on two different devices which aren’t permanently connected though. This is what’s meant with two local copies. If it’s data on an external hard drive, copy it to a second external hard drive. If it’s data on your computer, copy it to an external hard drive. The original data is of course the first copy. Thereby, you’ll have at least three copies of your data.Īt least two of these copies are stored locally (but on different devices) and at least one additional copy is stored offsite, e.g., at the office or in the cloud. The 3-2-1 StrategyĪs a quick refresher, a 3-2-1 strategy essentially means that you have at least one local backup and at least one offsite backup, e.g., in the cloud. In this post I’m going to describe how I implement that strategy, i.e., how I backup my computer, my external hard drives, and my Synology NAS. Hopefully, you’ve also heard of the 3-2-1 backup strategy.

You’ve almost certainly read many other blog posts stressing the importance of backups by now.

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