Protecting Our Digital Archive with the 3-2-1 Method
To protect and secure our family digital archive—which includes photos, videos and important documents—we’ll want to use the 3-2-1 backup method. That means…
THREE copies of our files.
Stored on TWO different types of media,
And at least ONE stored offsite..
On this path toward TWO different types of media, let's start with an external hard drive. Unlike cloud storage, this drive is a physical object that you'll store somewhere near your home computer.
There’s a good chance you already have external hard drives lying around your household. Shown below is a drive I bought years ago. It has some of the files that I’ll need to transfer, later on, to my permanent family archive.
It might be tempting to just re-use this same drive, and make it a part of my 3-2-1 backup/storage system. But remember that hard drives WILL fail at some point in their lives. And while some of my external hard drives are 10+ years old, any hard drive older than about 5 years presents a higher risk for failure, a risk that builds as hard drives continue to age.
So, better to start fresh with a new hard drive. A brand new product allows us to record the age of the hard drive, and that'll help us know when it might be a good idea to replace it, some years down the road.
We’ll want to focus on Solid State Drives, commonly called SSD hard drives.*
*"SSD drive" is technically a redundant phrase, but we can live with that. Just know that a SSD is newer tech than HDD (hard disc drives).
SSD will copy data faster than many of the older HDDs, and they’re also build to last longer. SSD will cost a bit more than standard HDD, but is well worth the upgrade.
Here’s a good example of an external hard drive we recently bought, to become one leg of our 3-2-1 archive backup.
We can find the Sandisk SSD at electronics stores like Best Buy, and of course at Amazon. We bought ours for about $140, but that’s a general figure; you may find deals better or worse over time.
This compact drive gives us two full terabytes (2 TB) of storage—which is plenty of space for a lifetime of curated files and memories.
It’s small enough to throw in a drawer or leave on your desk. It’s built tough, I feel like this would likely survive a drop onto concrete. It’s both faster and more durable than many older-style hard drives.
Be aware, this SanDisk drive uses a USB-C connector. If you have a reasonably recent home computer or laptop, it will connect directly to a port.
Comparing a USB-C to USB-A, we see that the newer USB-C port is oval in shape, and smaller than the rectangular USB-A port. USB-C is also easier to plug in since it works in both directions.
Most modern Mac computers as well as many PCs are equipped with USB-C ports.
If our older computer only has the rectangular USB-A ports, we’ll just need a small adapter. They’re easy to find and inexpensive.
So we’ll use the SanDisk drive as one full backup of our family archive, and pair it with a trusted cloud storage service as another backup. For the third backup, we can either use the space on our own working computer, use another external hard drive, or use another cloud service. That gets us to 3-2-1 protection—local, secondary, and offsite.
Backing up and securing our digital files doesn’t have to be complicated. Using the right tools and methods, we can permanently save what matters most, and rest easy that our archive is safe.