Backing Up Your Work: A Simple 3-2-1 Routine

Hard drives fail, laptops get lost, and mistakes happen. A backup plan turns those events into an inconvenience instead of a disaster.

The 3-2-1 rule is easy to remember:

• 3 copies of your data.
• 2 different kinds of storage, such as your laptop and an external drive.
• 1 copy stored off-site, such as cloud storage.

For code, Git and a remote like GitHub already cover the off-site copy. For everything else, such as photos, documents, and config files, an external drive plus a cloud service works well.

The step people skip is testing. Once a quarter, restore a file from each backup. A backup you’ve never restored is only a guess.