When thinking about your strategy around backups, recovery, availability, and business continuity, one part of the plan tends to fall by the wayside: backup retention. We focus so much on things like recovery objectives, SLAs, and tiers of data, that our thinking revolves around the need to potentially recover the backup that we just made a matter of minutes afterward. But there are data sets that need to be available weeks, months—even years—after they are made.

While data disasters are inevitable, having a planned backup strategy can mitigate its damaging effects. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, businesses and organizations should observe the 3-2-1 backup strategy for assured data safety. Superficially, the 3-2-1 backup rule is a backup strategy that increases and diversifies the number of backups used.

Today, businesses rely on the cloud to help with many tasks, from data backup to team collaboration. In fact, Zippia’s 2022 cloud adoption statistics reveal that 94% of enterprises use cloud services, and 48% of businesses choose to store their most important data in the cloud.” Discover the differences between cloud backup vs. cloud sync and storage in this post.

Hard drive crash. Ransomware. Equipment failure. Accidental deletion. Theft. There are plenty of reasons why end users want to have a secure and up-to-date backup of their most important files. And there are just as many approaches to backup and recovery as there are reasons to want it in place. In this article, we’ll discuss practical strategies and best practices for backing up important data, including consumer-level options and how to get the most from an enterprise-grade backup solution.