A backup is a spare key for your files. But a spare key under the doormat isn’t much of a spare. Here’s what backups are, why attackers go after them, and the simple 3-2-1 rule.
You probably have a spare key to your house. Maybe you hid one under the flower pot or inside one of those fake rocks by the door.
So did everyone else. Thieves figured that out years ago, and now the fake rock is the first place they look. A spare key only helps if it’s somewhere a thief won’t find it.
A backup is a spare copy of your files. But one spare taped to the same door isn’t really a spare. Keep copies in different places, so one bad day can’t take out everything.
Backups are the same story as that spare key. When attackers break into a network, one of the first things they try to do is find and delete the backups. This is especially true with ransomware: they lock up your files and demand payment, and they know you won’t pay if you can just restore from a backup.
If your backups live in the same place as the files they protect, and use the same accounts and passwords, they’re as good as gone. Same goes for a backup drive that’s always plugged into your computer.
The easy way to remember good backups:
Not every backup copies everything every time:
Together they save space while keeping lots of restore points. The more often you take snapshots, the closer to a specific moment you can go back. Some businesses can live with losing a day of work. Others can only afford to lose a few minutes.
A sync is not a backup. If your files sync to the cloud and you accidentally delete one, or ransomware scrambles it, the sync happily copies that mistake everywhere. A real backup lets you go back in time.
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