Users struggle to implement the 3-2-1 backup rule
14 posts across 6 communities in the last 60 days; 50% from r/selfhosted.
“using an sd card as the actual storage target for a backup is just playing russian roulette with your data lol. TBW is basically a marketing number for these things. the real issue is that sd cards dont have the same wear leveling or controller sophistication as an ssd. they…”
“I do this, alongside other methods.The problem with archiving data is you always need to be prepared to use the "next big thing" once your preferred method becomes unobtainable.I currently have :- Photos in iCloud (Live working copy)- Backup at home on NAS (updated nightly…”
“At some point maybe but I doubt I'll ever encounter it. It's not worth $600 annually to me to backup shit I pirated in the first place. I do this in part to save money. Redownloading stuff is annoying but over the lifetime of the NAS I'm not paying $10,000s just to avoid the…”
Several users are finding the standard '3-2-1' backup strategy difficult to apply effectively in personal and homelab scenarios. They question the relevance of certain components (like optical media) and seek clarification on what constitutes a truly independent copy, often turning to tools like borgbackup and rclone for encrypted snapshots and offsite storage.
SOURCES (54)
“using an sd card as the actual storage target for a backup is just playing russian roulette with your data lol. TBW is basically a marketing number for these things. the real issue is that sd cards dont have the same wear leveling or controller…”
“I'm slowly trying to get my Immich instance backed up with a proper 3-2-1 backup strategy despite my near-$0 budget. I have a friend who is willing to keep a backup at their place, and I have a spare Raspberry Pi 3B+ that I can use for this, connecting via tailscale and using either backrest or borgmatic for backups. I'm wondering: can I just back up to the micro sd card in it, or do I need to spring for an external ssd? It looks like the TBW ratings for good sd cards aren't too far”
“To be considered a real backup, you should not store it on the same PC, at least not exclusively. One of the most usual "I need my backup!" cases is a dead Harddisk, and it if your backup is on the same disk, you are out of luck. [re: [funeral warning] i lost alot of notes for obsidian sync/plugin bug]”
“That's why companies prefere using tape more than cloud. Not same cost tho [re: 3-2-1 backup]”
“The 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite. You know it. Your house can have a short circuit then your drives fry. You can lose an external HDD. So you keep one copy in the cloud. But wait, what can happen to the cloud? (don't know rules, but imagine here link to news about drones attacking Yandex data center, it easy googlable) The cloud can become a target. So sure, the probability of losing your data because a drone hits your cloud is small. But it's never zero. s”
“I do this, alongside other methods.The problem with archiving data is you always need to be prepared to use the "next big thing" once your preferred method becomes unobtainable.I currently have :- Photos in iCloud (Live working copy)- Backup at home on NAS (updated nightly, snapshots)- Backup in pCloud (lifetime, mine or theirs, no illusions, hopefully lasts a couple of months if I die unexpectedly)- Yearly archive on external HDDs, identical copies stored in separate locations, clearly labeled”
“Here is an overview and tutorials of alternative sync options. Also includes a free and automated 3-2-1 backup system. https://youtu.be/jQRcYIZbYg8”
Today's Save Your Photos Day, so here's the setup that finally worked for me: 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 offsite (for me that's [your setup, e.g. external SSD +…
it has to be a local backup otherwise good luck backing up the backup lol
“Depends. If you want unlimited and easy to setup go avepoint. You can contact them yourself then backup what you need. Good idea not to have backups on the thing youre backing up. 3-2-1 still applies.”
“I swear you're arguing and downvoting just to argue and downvote. Yes, those are different risks. Different risks that should both be mitigated by your backup solution. Which it is dead simple to do by simply... choosing literally any backup solution other than M365 Backup. Go have this ridiculous argument with someone else. I'm not responding anymore.”
“Is the famous 3-2-1 method overkill then? I was thinking of backing up my NAS with another NAS at a parents place, and those two copies already sound like a lot (photos and documents are what I’m saving)”
“Make it your backup target, because the best use for a spare 1 TB HDD is storing copies of everything you’d cry about losing.”
“Honestly, I think the more useful question is not really what replaces 3-2-1, but what parts of 3-2-1 actually matter for your environment. You can have 3 copies sitting in 3 different places and still have a pretty bad backup strategy if they're all accessible from the same admin account, replicate deletions instantly, or live in the same failure domain. I tend to think about backups in terms of failure scenarios instead: Hardware failure, accidental deletion, Ransomware/compromised admin c”
“Plugged in manually, I am slightly bad at remembering when to do it but I try to do it once a week or so”
“Personally I interpret the different media types to mean you should have at least two mechanisms for the backup. The cloud can count but the important thing is also having something in place to prevent partial hardware failure and data corruption from ruining your backups. If your main device’s RAM starts going bad (assuming you don’t have ECC) valid files will be read as junk data. I had this happen before, I had 32gb of RAM on my PC and only 1 stick was partially bad. Windows loaded fine and m”
“I see the 3-2-1 backup strategy advertised everywhere in discussion about this topic, but l’m wondering what are the other strategies developed and designed when it’s come to data preservation? I understand why 3-2-1 is powerful and so recommended. But for the sake of curiosity and learning, what are the other options? submitted by /u/T4toun3 [link] [comments]”
“I see the 3-2-1 backup strategy advertised everywhere in discussion about this topic, but l’m wondering what are the other strategies developed and designed when it’s come to data preservation? I understand why 3-2-1 is powerful and so recommended. But for the sake of curiosity and learning, what are the other options? submitted by /u/T4toun3 [link] [comments]”
“I have a Proxmox host with a 2 TB ext4 SSD used as storage for things like Immich, FTP uploads, and other persistent app data. Once per month, I power on a second mini PC running PBS. I back up VMs/LXCs there, then `rsync` the storage directory to a separate disk attached to that same mini PC. It stays off the rest of the time, intentionally, so I have an offline copy. For the VM/LXC side I’m fine with PBS; my question is specifically about the raw storage data. Is there a better approach that i”
“So you have 24tb of capacity, a single 4tb local backup and a 24tb offsite backup? You could make your life easier by automating things. It would also be better not to physically transport fragile drives so often, but otherwise it sounds like you are backed up.”
Not all companies have an IT department that pays attention
“I run nextcloud and have that folder upload to proton drive. I don't care about most of the other files on the NAS”
“Simple bash script to zip some folders and then to S3. Fits my simple needs, but might check out Restic when I get some down time.”
“How are you doing it? Did you manage to store restic backup or similar to protondrive?”
“Funny enough, oneDrive via restic/rclone. I found out that family members have a family subscription with 6 accounts, each 1TB. So I'm using one of them and putting everything there. The setup is kind of meh but once it's working, it's working.”
“Cheap but a pain to get back is just fine. I use AWS Glacier. It's not actually much of a pain to get back. You just click the files you want, wait from minutes to hours, then download your data. Not a pain at all, really. It's my restore of last resort. If it takes a few hours or even a few days to get my dvd rips or whatever back it's no big deal. Totally worth it to be my 1 in 3-2-1.”
“At some point maybe but I doubt I'll ever encounter it. It's not worth $600 annually to me to backup shit I pirated in the first place. I do this in part to save money. Redownloading stuff is annoying but over the lifetime of the NAS I'm not paying $10,000s just to avoid the possibility of replaceable data being lost in the unlikely event of a multiple simultaneous disk failure. For that cost I'd probably sooner ask one of my mates to host my personal backup server at their place”
“Same, borg and pbs in via wireguard to my place connected lxcs on a nanopi m5 with 4tb ssd. (about 2-3w idle) Another lxc serves the complete arr-stack for my family.”
“With how expensive storage has gotten, pcloud lifetime storage isn’t that bad of an idea.”
“Simple, I don't store the heavy stuff like stream backups offsite, only on my NAS. Only the critical things is synced with my nextcloud ( which serve as my offsite backup.”
“My main server is in colocation in a professional data center. That is copy No1 with multiple high availability mechanisms already there. I do backups to a secondary server I keep at home and online. That is copy No 2 which is also on a different site. I also have a PBS server at home that all my Proxmox hosts can write to but can not delete. That is my 3rd copy that I consider offline because once there, there are no logical components that can alter it, even from a fully compromised host.”
iDrive and iCloud for computer. Cloudflare R2 for server.
“Hey all, After investing weeks into ripping my personal DVD collection and I have nearly 2 TB of movies and data, I am realizing how devastated I would be if I lost everything. Currently I have a single 8TB drive, and I am looking to expand that to 2 so that I can mirror using raid to account for drive failure. RAID isn't backup so I know that this is my "first" copy of my data. I would then like to obtain a 3rd 8TB drive that I will plug in, copy once every 2-3 months, and then st”
“Copy/sync is not a backup. Well, it is for some cases, but clearly not all. Using a dedicated backup solution is way better (and more efficient). To me, rsync is not that much better than dd, since it will happily overwrite data. One project I quite like is duplicati (don't get fooled by the heavily commercial homepage, you can run it for free without hassle). But basically, you want something that allows rolling back changes over a reasonable period. Even if your last snapshot is fully corr”
“3-2-1 only says "3 copies, 2 on different storage types, 1 off-site". 3-2-1 won't protect you from propagating corrupt data. Edit: What you want is incremental backup, ideally deduplicated and with built-in integrity verifications. You want specialized backup tools like Borg, Restic, Kopia. You do NOT want rsync, rclone, dd or plain copy. You can put together a DIY thing with rsync but why bother when there are specialized tools that do it so much better. Borg will also let you do”
“3-2-1 doesn't help this situation. The idea that a minimal backup solution should involve three copies of the data (one primary copy and two backup copies), where two different media types are involved in storing the copies, and one of the copies is stored offsite in a remote location If you're overwriting previous backups with corrupted data, this storage strategy won't help. What you want (in addition to 3-2-1) is incremental backups with retention times suitable to the situation.”
“I've got a few different recovery options I set up from the beginning. Snapshots where they are available. Database dumps to external storage. The NAS creates a backup to a remote NAS. There's revolving external disk's. An off-site replica. It's saved me a few times having a few different ways to recover my services”
“If the application's state is stored entirely in the DB, the answer is absolutely to back up the DB using whatever backup tools that DB provides ( not by just copying the database on disk).”
“We currently have Veeam in a Hyper-v environment. I backup to a local host, as well as do cloud copy jobs. In the vain of 3-2-1 backup philosophy, I would like to setup an additional redundant backup solution and our old Veeam host hardware. The server is just setting there. What additional redundant backup solution would everyone recommend to run adjacent to Veeam? submitted by /u/Ok_SysAdmin [link] [comments]”
“... and sending those snapshots to another PC for backup (still need to send those to another geographical location, but working on it 🙂)”
“Another important thing is if your backing up only your data, or is a application, application + data, the whole VM? My infrastructure is written completey in code so that is one backup of my infrastructure. The only other backup I need is data because every config file, command etc.. Is saved in the IaC part of the backup.”
“Yea I’d clone the drive just to have that backup, then you could also copy the profile. Just to be double sure. Remember that 3 backups is 2, 2 backups are 1, and 1 is none.”
“Firstly, you need to decide what "3-2-1" really means. 3 copies - makes sense. 2 types of media - kinda redundant now. It basically used to mean "one copy on tape" but that now makes sense in almost no personal scenarios and not even that many business scenarios. For a while optical made sense but it's also a marginal solution now. Some people substitute Cloud but that has its own problems in that it's mostly just HDDs again and has its own reasons why you might not w”
“try borgbackup for encrypted snapshots on your ssd then rsync the repo to your parents hdd for offsite”
“A second drive in the same icybox on the same laptop isn't a second copy for 3-2-1 purposes, it's the same copy, one PSU, OS, or spilled drink takes out both. The "2" is two independent devices and the "1" is offsite, so a cheap win is your tinypc backing up to the laptop (or vice versa) plus one remote target. And use restic or borg rather than a plain mirror, because versioned snapshots are what save you when the thing you're backing up is already corrupted or e”
“u/ss_edge Could you share what is the issue/error you are facing? Also, feel free to raise an issue regarding the same.”