The 3-2-1 Rule
The 3-2-1 Rule is critical to ensuring your business is secure, reliable, and well-prepared for any disaster or operational interruption. Adhering to the 3-2-1 Rules with Veeam, you can ensure your data is effectively safeguarded from potential losses or corruption.
Following the 3-2-1 rule, users can ensure that their data is adequately protected against loss or corruption. It is essential for anyone who needs to securely store important information and to prevent loss or damage of irreplaceable files, it also allows:
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Makes it easier to have multiple versions of your backups, as you can keep multiple copies of the same file and keep all of them secure and stored separately.
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Eliminates the risk of accidental data corruption or deletion of an important file, as you have copies that you can restore from.
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Essential for meeting security compliance regulations, as many organizations must store and back up data according to regulations.
Veeam Features for Success
Aside from solely using the 3-2-1 rule to protect your data, Veeam offers a variety of tools to aide using Veeam Backup & Replication for all your data and workloads:
| Long Term Retention (GFS) | The long-term or Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) retention policy allows you to store backup files for long periods of time — for weeks, months and even years. |
| Backup Copy | With backup copy, you can create several instances of the same backup file and copy them to secondary (target) backup repositories for long-term storage. |
| Object Storage | Object Storage allows you to extend your on-premises backup storage with object storage (like Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, etc.) in a hybrid or cloud environment. |
| Tape Support | Veeam Backup & Replication offers strong support for backup to tape, allowing users to create backup jobs that target tape media. It includes features for managing tape libraries and supports Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) rotation schemes for long-term retention. Additionally, Veeam enables multi-tiered storage, moving older backups to tape for cost-effective storage solutions. The platform also provides capabilities to restore data from tape backups, ensuring accessibility even with physical media. |
RTO & RPO
Recovery Point Objective defines a period during which you may accept to lose data. The age of the latest backup will be used for recovery in case of a failure.
This means that your company accepts that, in case of a failure, you may lose the data that has been accumulated since the latest restore point.
Recovery Time Objective is related to downtime. RTO represents the time from the beginning of an incident until all services are back online and available to users.
RTO can be viewed as your company's goal for the maximum amount of time the organization can tolerate being without services.
Defining RPO and RTO will be crucial to understanding what your infrastructure capabilities and requirements will need to be prior to making any decisions.
Backup, Replication, or Both?
Many administrators question why there would be a need for backup if they're replicating their data. It comes down to RPO and RTO needs and how each technology delivers on those needs differently. Most often, both backup and replication are part of the right solution. Here's why:
| Backup | Replication | Both |
| The key function of data backup is the ability to retrieve data from any point, it could be the most recent backup, all the way back to the oldest backup, enabling the restore of any data protected within that period. | The key function of replication is to ensure services remain running in the event of a data protection event. Replication achieves this by making a copy of a running virtual machine and then synchronizes updates from that running VM at regular intervals so that the replica is ready to run with the most current information should the need arise for a failover—the content of a replica changes with each new synchronization. Failover can occur rapidly and often results in little to no downtime for the business. | Implementing a strategy utilizing bother backup and replication ensures that you are able to retain and restore any backup data and keep services running in the event of a data protection event.
In terms of RPO and RTO, referring to the image above, regular backup gives a good RPO, but the key function of backup is retrievability. Replication, on the other hand, has a focus on keeping services up and running with limited downtime. |