It’s a mantra oft-repeated, but never actually listened to by the vast majority of people who use it: “Cloud storage is not a backup solution.” Many times I’ve been laughed at and had pages of end-user license documentation thrown at me, all espousing the wonders of the cloud and how you’ll never lose your data again. That’s all well and good, but what happens when the cloud storage service you’ve chosen to host all the photos of Timmy’s third birthday party decide to pack up shop and close down?

That’s exactly what’s happening with Amazon Drive, a direct competitor to the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. It was a pretty compelling offer if you were an Amazon Prime member, as you got 5GB of cloud storage for free with your subscription. Yet, despite being one of the “big three” in the cloud computing space, after the 31st of December 2023, if you’ve got files stored on the service, they’re gone.

Okay, maybe not entirely. Any photos or videos you’ve saved in Amazon Drive will automatically migrate to Amazon Photos, which Amazon says they’re concentrating on for the foreseeable future. But if you’ve got Word documents, PDFs or anything else, it’s got to move or you’ll lose it once the cut-off date is reached.

This highlights my original point; “cloud storage is not a backup solution.” It can certainly be a link in the chain, but it’s definitely not the only place you should be keeping your data, especially if it’s priceless or impossible to replace. So what are you supposed to do?

Enter the 3-2-1 Backup Solution, and it’s a great rule to follow. In summary, it means having at least three total copies of your data, on two different mediums, one of which is off-site. I’ve included a handy diagram below (print it out and stick it on your fridge if it helps).

Basically, you’ve got a file. His name is “John.txt”. “John.txt” lives on your computer at home (one copy). You place a copy of “John.txt” onto the external hard drive you’ve got attached to your computer (two copies, on two different storage mediums). You’ve also got Dropbox installed on your computer, and as part of its daily operations, it scans and uploads “John.txt” to your Dropbox (three copies, two different storage mediums).

And there we go. “John.txt” lives in three separate locations, on two different types of storage, one of which is offsite. The 3-2-1 Backup Solution in practice. For a more real-world example, take my personal use case:

I have a data hoarding problem, and as a result, I have a home storage server (NAS) with 16TB of usable space. All the devices in my house have daily incremental backups that are sent to the NAS while we sleep. While that has a certain amount of redundancy built-in, it’s not going to save my data if my house burns down or we flood (again). So every three months, I purchase a 18TB hard drive, put a copy of everything onto the drive, wrap it up and post it to my mother, who puts it in a box with about 14 other hard drives all there for the same purpose.

My example is probably a bit overkill, but I see having a robust, reliable backup solution like paying for home and contents insurance: you pay the price hoping you don’t need to use it. While the 3-2-1 Backup Solution isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it’s a whole lot better than not having a backup solution at all.

So, at the end of it all, what can you do to make sure that your data is actually backed up and safe?

• Always have at least two copies of your data on-hand
• Always have at least one copy of your data off-site in a secure location
• Diversify your storage mediums (hard drives, DVDs, USB drives, high-density tape, rock carving etc)
• Don’t just store your files “in the cloud” and call it a day
• Verify your backups