Did you know there is a semi-official designation that March 31 is “World Backup Day”? It’s true, and while we do celebrate it here at Veeam, we are also a proponent of one better: “World Availability Day,” because while backup is important, it’s just not enough.

Because backup is still important, I pose the question: How many backups are enough? There’s no clear answer to that, but I’m a fan of two, and if you are really into availability, having one additional way to recover data. The good news about technology today is that if you invest in a modern data center, you have a lot of options. Being highly virtualized, investing in a modern storage system, and having a cloud strategy will put forth a lot of options to ensure availability.

One timeless approach to this topic is the 3-2-1 Rule. While not new, it has been used for IT pros to set rules for data protection and backups. If you are not familiar with the 3-2-1 Rule, it states:

• You should have 3 copies of your data
• On 2 different media
• 1 of which is kept off-site

The good news is that it is extremely versatile and it doesn’t lock us into any particular technology. Additionally, it can address nearly any failure scenario from a media or device perspective. Here’s a way to visualize the options of the 3-2-1 Rule:

The 3-2-1 Rule is good, but using it means only two copies of the backups (ideally one off-site). Would two backups be enough? For some, it may. In fact, I recommend many people have two collections of backups for performance reasons. I’ve touted the ultimate backup storage architecture for a while, and it dictates two backups. The first has high performance (will help you on recovery!) and the second generally has slower performance but more retention (a good candidate for deduplication!).

You can add extra availability by making backups or some other restore option available. Today that includes sending storage snapshots off-site, which can lead to some very quick and complete recovery options. How about the replicated VM? That’s a very quick recovery time objective technology as it is a performance-on-par-as-primary recovery option. Sure, today we can still use tapes holding backups, but they aren’t very 2015 if you ask me. Speaking of 2015, maybe it’s time to put backups in a service provider cloud. It’s a legitimate option today, but it all depends on the requirements and preferences of any specific data profile. The good news is that there are many options to unlock the availability that the important data needs, but what will be the best number of backups? I frequently recommend two, yet consistently add one more recovery option as well.

What’s your take on the right number of backups? Do you have different data profiles with different rules? Share your experience below.