Everyone has backups until the day they need them. That is when facilities discover the job had been silently failing, the backup was never tested, or ransomware encrypted the backups along with everything else. In long-term care, where resident data must be available and recoverable, that discovery is a disaster.
The 3-2-1 rule, explained
- Three copies of your data: the live copy plus two backups.
- Two different types of storage, so one failure does not take out both.
- One copy kept off-site, protected from a fire, flood, or local ransomware event.
What healthcare adds to the rule
For a care facility, three-two-one is the floor, not the ceiling. Resident data demands a few things more.
- Encryption, so a stolen or intercepted backup is useless to anyone else.
- Immutability, so an attacker who gets in cannot alter or delete the backups.
- Verified restores, so you know the backup actually works before you need it.
- A known recovery time, so you can answer how long a full restore really takes.
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. We test restores on a schedule so that recovery is a routine we have already rehearsed.
Recovery is the real test
The point of backup is not storage. It is getting your facility back online quickly after the worst happens. That is why we measure success by recovery time, not by whether a job says it completed.