The 3-2-1 Backup Rule for Data Hoarders: What Off-Site Actually Means at 50TB+
The 3-2-1 backup rule gets repeated so often it’s turned into a slogan: three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one copy off-site. It’s good advice. It’s also advice that was mostly written with a few hundred gigabytes of irreplaceable photos in mind, not the 50, 100, or 200TB array a serious data hoarder ends up running. At that scale, “just keep an off-site copy” stops being a checkbox and starts being a real infrastructure and cost decision. Here’s what each part of 3-2-1 actually means once your data won’t fit on a shelf of external drives anymore. ...