Your own website is the virtual "avatar" for companies, the self-employed and associations. In an increasingly digital world, the accessibility of one's own website is of enormous importance for the success or failure of companies.
But what happens if everything suddenly goes down from one second to the next, be it due to a hacker attack, a faulty update or a server failure?
Then you need a backup to keep the downtime as short as possible. Backups are therefore the "life insurance" of your website.
However, your backup should have been created in such a way that you can be sure that there will be no nasty surprises after the "restore". A faulty backup is worse than no backup at all, as it reflects a level of security that does not exist.
If you want to be sure that your website can be restored after an outage, the proven concept of the "3-2-1" rule will help.
In this article, you will learn how the 3-2-1 rule creates real data security and why even small websites urgently need reliable backups.
What is the 3-2-1 rule for website backups?
The 3-2-1 rule is an experienced concept of a data backup strategy and is considered the standard in backup management. It was developed to maximize the so-called "resilience" of data against various causes of failure. The name 3-2-1 is
3 Copies of your website data
Always have at least three copies of your data ready. This includes the "original", i.e. the live data of your website on your server, plus two complete backup copies. The aim is to create redundancy so that the failure of one copy does not lead to complete data loss.
2 different storage media
The two backup copies should be stored on at least two different types of media. This protects against media-specific failures. Examples of this are an external hard disk (local), a network attached storage (NAS) in the home or office network, a USB stick or cloud storage. The diversification of storage media minimizes the risk that a fault in one type of media (e.g. defect in a certain type of hard drive) renders all backups unusable.
1 copy in an external location
At least one of the backup copies should be stored at a different physical location.
This is the decisive protection against local disasters such as fire, water damage, theft or a power failure in the data center. Cloud storage is an ideal solution for this, as the data is geographically distributed and stored with high availability.
Alternatively, an external hard disk could be stored in a safe place outside your own office or home.
This strategy significantly minimizes the risk of complete data loss and protects against most disaster scenarios, from hardware failures to natural disasters.
Why are backups so important for websites?
Websites today are complex systems and consist of a large number of components: Databases (often MySQL/MariaDB), media files (images, videos, PDFs), configuration files (e.g. for web servers or CMS), and often also individual programming (plugins, themes).
A loss of data in one of these areas can impair the entire functionality of the website or lead to complete failure. A failure or loss of data can be caused by the following situations:
- Hacker attacks & malware: Attackers can delete, encrypt (ransomware) or manipulate data. Malware can settle on the server unnoticed and damage the website.
- Faulty updates or plugins: An unsuccessful update of the content management system (CMS), a theme or a plugin can make the website inaccessible or lead to malfunctions.
- Hardware defects: Failures of server hard disks, memory modules or other components can lead to data loss.
- Human error: Accidental deletion of files, incorrect configurations or faulty database operations are common causes of data problems. Unfortunately, this happens more often than you might think.
- Natural disasters (e.g. fire, flooding): Physical damage to the data center or server location can lead to the total loss of data.
Without an up-to-date backup, restoring the website is often extremely time-consuming, costly or, in the worst case, no longer possible at all.
Why small websites are particularly at risk
Small websites in particular, whether private blogs, club websites or the websites of small businesses and the self-employed, are often underestimated when it comes to backups. However, the consequences of data loss can be serious here too:
- Loss of confidence: Customers and visitors expect a website to be accessible and secure at all times. A prolonged outage can permanently damage trust in the company or the person behind the website. This can lead to a loss of sales or readership.
- SEO losses: Search engines such as Google rate outages, inaccessible pages or data loss negatively. This can lead to a drastic drop in search engine rankings, which affects visibility and traffic in the long term. Recovering lost rankings is often a lengthy process.
- Legal risks: If your website processes personal data (e.g. via contact forms, newsletter registrations, customer accounts), a data breach can have serious legal consequences in the context of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or other data protection laws.
- Lack of resources: Small operators often do not have their own IT department or in-depth technical knowledge. Restoring a website from scratch without a functioning backup is usually an insurmountable hurdle for them.
- Irretrievable content: Your own blog articles, painstakingly created product descriptions, valuable image galleries or collected user comments can be irretrievably lost if there is no backup. This represents not only a financial but often also an intangible value.
How to implement the 3-2-1 rule for your website
Implementing the 3-2-1 rule for a website is easier than ever with today's tools:
| Copy | Storage location | Medium | Notes |
| Original | Web server | Hard disk/SSD | This is the current, live version of your website. Make sure your hosting provider performs regular backups on the server side (although these rarely meet the 3-2-1 rule and are often not enough to count as one of your "3 copies" as they are usually not sufficiently separated from your own copies). |
| Backup 1 | Office/home network | External hard disk/NAS | Create a copy of your website data (files and database) and save it locally on an external hard disk or a Network Attached Storage (NAS). This enables a quick recovery in the event of minor problems. Make sure you store these media securely and check them regularly. |
| Backup 2 | External location | Cloud storage | A second backup copy should be stored in a cloud storage service (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, OneDrive). This protects against local disasters and offers high availability. Many backup plugins for CMS such as WordPress offer direct integrations for cloud services. Make sure that the service you choose meets your data protection requirements. |
Practical tips for implementation:
- Automate backups: Use backup plugins for your content management system (e.g. UpdraftPlus or All-in-One WP Migration for WordPress) or scripts that create regular, ideally daily, backups. Automation ensures that backups are made consistently and without human intervention.
- Test the restoration of your backups regularly: A backup is only as good as its recoverability. Perform test restores on a staging environment or a local server at regular intervals (e.g. monthly or quarterly). This will ensure that your backups are intact and complete and that you know how the recovery process works in the event of an emergency.
- Encrypt external backups and protect them from unauthorized access: Backups stored in the cloud or on portable media in particular should be protected with strong passwords and encryption. This prevents unauthorized persons from accessing sensitive data if the storage medium falls into the wrong hands.
- Versioning: Save not only the latest backup copy, but also older versions. This allows you to revert to previous states of the website if a problem is only noticed later or you need to restore an older version.
- Integrity check: Some backup solutions offer the option of checking the integrity of the backups. Use these functions to ensure that the data is not corrupted.
Conclusion
The 3-2-1 rule is a simple but extremely effective strategy that offers maximum protection against data loss - even for the often underestimated small websites. Those who rely on regular, diversified and external backups can react quickly in an emergency and reliably restore their website, minimizing potential losses of reputation, SEO rankings and revenue. Don't neglect the issue: a functioning backup is the best protection for your digital presence and a decisive factor for the continuity of your online presence.
And if you don't want to deal with this at all, but still want to be sure that your backups are working, then take a look at our maintenance contracts.
All backups of our customers' websites are backed up three times with as many as three different storage media (web server, external server, NAS cloud) and GDPR-compliant cloud storage at three different locations ... and tested: We regularly check the correct functioning of website backups on our test servers.