Hello World! Welcome to this blog. I am shipping containers to Azure @ Microsoft by day and author of this blog by night.
Most of the posts highlight what I am focused on and express work and personal experience. Reason I put them here - recall later or help someone else with similar challenge.
It just coincided that release of CloudBerry Backup 5.6 happen in the same day as my birthday. May, 15th, CloudBerry Lab made it happen and shipped its the most important and widely waited backup release.
There are many great posts about this strategy, however let's keep things simple and explain the need of this rule as well as the underlying problem. We all live in madly expanding digital world, where things like terabytes and petabytes are not exotic. We live in the world, where digital documents and pictures become more important than its paper copies (if exist). I am sure everyone faced the issue with the data loss and from that point we usually start to think about our backups or at least to have data redundancy. I think 3-2-1 rule is the best tactic to guarantee data redundancy. Essentially this rules tells the following:
Since we need to keep our backup in two different locations, I would consider something large and scalable enough locally (e.g. removable USB disk, NAS etc) and cloud storage (your choice). Depends on the amount, required performance and budget you want to the Amazon Cloud Drive, MS One Drive, AWS S3, B2 and others. For backup sets up to 15 Gb it is probably good to stick with something even free (e.g. Google Drive) can be used for storing and exchange files. Having something local and storage details in the cloud we can start our backup configuration to follow 3-2-1 rule.
Our main goal is to get our data protected to follow the rule. We have original data which is 1, we will have backup of this data on USB drive what is 2 and lastly we'll get this backup offloaded to the Google Cloud which is 3.
Let's first get the backup product, we also need to attach out USB disk to our computer and lastly we need our sing-in credentials for Google Drive. Google Drive configuration requires either service account (advanced) or user name (email) and password.
In short, hybrid backup make 3-2-1 follow easy since it allows administrator to set up two backup destination for one backup set concurrently.
With Hybrid backup we can define local destination as our primary backup storage and cloud storage as secondary. The good thing around this feature is that it allows me to touch my source data once: one VSS snapshot (if enabled), one time copy, one time compression, one time encryption. Since I may work with some critical data or data that can be used during business hours, my dual-destination backup might be wide from backup window perspective, so two iteration hybrid backup makes more sense. Hybrid backup in CloudBerry Lab offers local destination (e.g. CIFS, NAS, local disk) as primary destination and cloud provider (any of the above list) as secondary (off-site) location. This approach helps us to follow 3-2-1 for sure!
Together with Hybrid backup this feature offers sequential plan start. It is similar to post plan activity. For example we run Hybrid backup and once complete we want to copy data over to somewhere else (let's say our copy #4 with for longer term retention).
That's it!
