The 3-2-1 rule says: 3 copies of what matters, on 2 different kinds of storage, with 1 copy away from where the rest lives. The point is not the numbers: it is making sure no single accident catches every copy at once. The general ideas are in making and keeping your own backup. This article gets concrete: what the rule looks like for a site on shared hosting.
The three copies of a site
| Copy |
Where it lives |
What it protects you from |
| 1. The original |
The live site, in the account. |
Nothing. It is what you are protecting. |
| 2. Your local copy |
On your computer or on an external disk that stays unplugged. |
A closed account, a serious server failure, a mistake nobody noticed for weeks. |
| 3. Your off-site copy |
Somewhere else, with someone else: cloud storage or another server. |
A stolen or dead computer, a fire or flood at the office, ransomware that encrypts the connected disk. |
| Bonus: our automatic copy |
In JetBackup, in cPanel. Daily, before dawn, with the last 30 days kept on active accounts. |
A recent mistake: a plugin that broke the site, a folder deleted this week. See restoring with JetBackup. |
The two kinds of storage are, for example, the server disk and your external disk; the off-site copy is the one held by another party at another address. Our daily copy is an excellent safety net for everyday accidents, but do not count it as the off-site copy: it covers this week’s mistakes, not a closed account or damage older than a month.
Putting the rule to work
| 1 |
Decide what “what matters” is. On a site it is four things: the files, the database, the mailboxes (if you use them) and whatever lives only in your head (passwords, DNS records, a list of plugins). Without the database, a copy of the files gives you an empty site.
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| 3 |
Make the off-site copy. Send a second copy of the same file to cloud storage or to another server: off-site backups. If you have a VPS, rsync does this well.
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| 4 |
Write down where each copy is and what day it is from. A sheet with three lines is enough. When it matters, nobody remembers which disk held the good one.
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A synced folder is not a backup. Services that keep a folder identical in several places also replicate what you delete and what ransomware encrypts. If you use one, pick one that keeps older versions of files, or use it only as transport and keep dated copies separately.
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Encrypt the copies that leave the building. A full copy carries the database with your customers’ data and the wp-config.php with its passwords. Keep it in a password-protected archive and keep that password somewhere else, not next to the file.
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Want to confirm what your account keeps for you before deciding what is left for you to keep?
Open a support ticket
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