Building a gingerbread house is a perennial tradition in many, many households. Those with experience know that precise, careful preparation leads to a successful, long-lasting final product, while rushing and cutting corners usually leave you with a crumbling, fragile mess.

Much of the same can be said of your business’ data. This essential operational resource is terrifyingly susceptible to a litany of threats and issues that could easily bring your processes tumbling down… hence, why the 3-2-1 Backup Rule is a core element of successful business continuity.

Let’s take a moment to consider the recipe for a reliable, disaster-proof backup, and how it aligns with the process of making a gingerbread house.

The Basic Ingredients of a Reliable Backup

Generally speaking, there are three overall components that any gingerbread house needs to have: the cookie sheets, the icing, and the candy decorations. These three elements line up with the first part of the 3-2-1 Backup Rule: keeping multiple copies of your data.

• 3. The cookie sheets you use to build the walls of your gingerbread house represent the data you store on your servers and use every day.
  
  
• 2. The icing represents your on-site backup, ready and waiting for any quick corrections or emergency fixes. This is often stored on network-attached storage options.
  
  
• 1. The candy decorations you use to make your gingerbread house look pretty and appetizing represent your off-site backup, ready to restore all your data in case of a true catastrophe. We recommend using the cloud for several reasons, including the fact that it is likely to be redundantly stored across multiple locations, helping ensure you have a copy available if necessary. 

Supporting Your Backup Properly

You must maintain three copies of your data (at the absolute minimum) simply so you have a backup of your backup, in a way. What happens if your server is fried by a power surge? You have your network-attached storage to lean on. If both your server and NAS go up in smoke during a fire, the cloud copies are safely preserved and ready to restore your data to the replacement hardware you procure. Just as you want your gingerbread house to have more than a paper plate as its foundation, you need your backup to be grounded in redundant safeguards.

Keeping Your Backup Out of Reach

Let’s be clear about something: even if constructed perfectly, your gingerbread house isn’t necessarily safe from a disaster… especially if it is just left out in the open. Somebody could walk by and help themselves to a few of the gumdrops lining the roof, or the chocolate candies you used to represent a door. Rover could accidentally knock it off the table if chasing a ball too enthusiastically. Long story short, you need to keep the house safe long after you’ve built it.

Storing at least one copy of your data offsite is like hiding extra candies in the cabinet, or like hiding the whole thing in the back of the refrigerator. It helps protect your data by keeping it in a more secure place, relatively safer, and less susceptible to external forces.

We’ll Be There to Help Put Your Gingerbread House Together and Keep It Safe

We’ve seen what happens when a business fails to follow the 3-2-1 Backup rule, and believe us…it’s a lot worse than a cracked cookie or some missing detail work. Not only does it not look good for the business, but fixing the problem after the fact is astronomically expensive. That’s why we work with businesses in Bay Area & Northern California to put together a backup and disaster recovery strategy for each, testing them to ensure they work as expected.

Don’t let your business crumble under pressure. Give us a call at (415) 295-4898 to ensure your business continuity for the holiday season and beyond.