Hello RAMblers,
Today I want to tell you a little story about backups. When I was a cadet I was getting a ride to Denver to catch a flight for one of the breaks. That semester I was enrolled in a 499 with the Computer Science department. I was building a simulation of a metamorphic robot design that Dr. Baird, who was a Lt Col at the time, had come up with.
Interestingly, Dr. Baird has several patents for cryptography and is the creator of Hashgraph, a distributed blockchain/ledger technology (HBAR for all you crypto fans).
The work I had been doing all semester was stored in exactly one location, my laptop (we were the second USAFA class to get laptops). That day I packed my backpack with my clothes, my laptop, some books, and my lunch which consisted of a sandwich and two diet cokes. My bag got thrown in the back with the other bags and we drove to Denver to catch our flights.
When we got there, I discovered that one of the Diet Coke's had ruptured and my laptop had been sitting in a pool of Diet Coke for almost an hour. I dried up whatever I could and after waiting for things to dry out tried to power it up. It powered up but the hard drive wasn't working. I tried various remedies, to include moving the plates from the damaged drive to a new, identical drive, but nothing worked. Fortunately I was able to use a copy of my project that I had sent to my instructor but I lost about a month of progress.
This brings me to the 3-2-1 concept for backups. Today there are many more options for backing up and synchronizing data, but the 3-2-1 concept still applies. It's a rule of thumb that says you should make 3 copies of your data, using 2 different types of media, and at least 1 copy should be offsite.
Let's break this down briefly, in reverse order.
- 1 Copy Offsite: If there's a fire, flood, or other local emergency you want to have a copy that's safely far away.
- 2 Different Media Types: This will make sure that you don't have a single point of failure in your backup system.
- 3 Copies: Having two copies locally is a good idea in case one of your backups fails since off-site copies typically take longer to retrieve. Two local copies plus your off-site copy makes three total copies.
Admittedly, this system is less relevant today than it was 20 years ago. With cloud storage and distributed version control systems, we can easily move data around the globe. But that doesn't mean it's completely irrelevant. You still need to make sure you have some backup strategy, even if it isn't as robust as 3-2-1. At a minimum I'd suggest a local copy and a cloud copy.
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-James Trimble
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