Whether it is the personal computer or it is the dedicated server, it is important to have a strategy that will be successful for you personally or your organization. One strategy that I have found personally that is successful and that can be used in a larger scale to fit a large organization or to backup the family pictures is the 3-2-1 method.

Basically this means:

3 Different backups – Have three backups – one being the primary backup and two being secondary backups

2 Types of Media – I use a hard drive and a online backup

1 Offsite location – My offsite location is a safety security box at a branch of my bank 30 miles away.

There are some concessions you can make to this plan to fit yourself. For example, instead of using a hard drive, you could use a USB thumb drive depending on how much storage you need to be backed up. Another different way you could go is you can move your offsite location to be something less expensive, like at a relative’s house (at least 25 miles away from the primary backup location). To make this work for a large organization, you could multiply the 3-2-1 strategy by a factor of 2 or 3. Meaning that if you used the 2-factor version of 3-2-1, you would have 6 backups, 4 types of media (your IT department will love this, because they can dust off the old 3M QIC drives), and 2 offsite locations (in diverse geographical locations in case of catastrophe). As you can see it is easy to have a successful backup plan, but you must remain dedicated to your plan.