I don’t have too much critical data to backup. I have a low power thin client (lenovo m720q with a 2tb sata drive) I park at a friends house on their network. In exchange I let them borrow a bit of space on it too.

well I have encrypted off site copies at my partners house in London and my other partners parents house across the state. just be poly!

as far as the two goes, I have copies on physical spinning platters and copies of critical data on ssds.

as far as the one is concerned, I have separation of copies from the Washington coast to London so it would have to be a world ending disaster to cause me to lose all copies of my data.

that being said it has taken me the better part of a decade to get this far and they are all cold copies so they require maintenance to keep up to date. that being said they can’t be infected from the internet very easily that way

what’s the 3-2-1 rule?

I get down on my knees every month just to pray that I don’t need to use my back ups. Then, when the inevitable happens, I get down on my knees and pray thanks that I have my back ups.

More religious than anything else in my life. I have had numerous events occur over the past 2 decades and can confirm that restoring is so much easier and better than installing from scratch. Also data( in my case the usual pictures/movies/documents/etc) are at least duplicated on other media/devices/etc.

3-2-1 is the minimum I follow for anything important.

1 copy is the working data, 1 copy is a full system image stored on a NAS with incremental backups done nightly with Veeam, and 1 copy is on Backblaze B2 with incremental backups done nightly with Restic,

I follow it for the most critical data, other data get just one copy (but those data is not important to me)

I follow it personally, backup locally to a WD drive, and cloud is idrive

I’m a photographer with almost 25TB of photographs.

Primary storage: diy truenas On-site backup: off the shelf branded nas Off-site backup: cloud storage.

Just a note: any automated backup you need to be 100% sure you have set it up to not sync deletions.

Locally, I have RAID on my NAS, my sentimental stuff is mostly synced with other systems through seafile (similar to nextcloud), and is also backed up to backblaze.

For everything else, it’s just RAID.

I do main data at home, external HD as backup offsite (I update maybe 1-2x a year otherwise it’s turned off/unplugged), and any new files not on the backup are in cloud storage + local HD, separate from main data.

If either drive failed I’d just order a new one since the odds of both failing within a couple days would be low.

I have a 2-2-0 for now. The problem is with 100 TB of data, it’s hard to find an offsite back up that is reasonable priced.
Everyone else seems to have parents or these things called “friends” that they can ask to hold onto. Wonder where I can find them.

If by 3-2-1 you mean what I try to repeat to myself calmly when I lose my data, then yes

There are excellent articles that go over all this. Do a something search.

Bottom line, yes, you should at least do 3-2-1 methodology. More than that is gravy.

I do not follow it. We have an offline cloud copy and a physical copy at home. We don’t have anywhere to easily store a second copy that’s not at home, and I don’t want to update it yearly. I still suggest the 3 2 1 rule though: i know that if the cloud has an issue or my physical disk corrupts it could be a serious problem.

For me I used the cloud as my offsite backup but it’s only the most important stuff and it’s scattered between several Gmail accounts iCloud and OneDrive. Working on consolidation but right now it’s backed up somewhere other than my server. Back when I first started my data hoarding journey I only had a single harddrive and my old computer. Important stuff was already saved to the cloud so all I did was download it onto the drive. I still primarily save anything important in the cloud first but it’s all synced with my server too.