We had a call a while back from someone whose server cupboard had flooded. Not dramatically, just a slow leak from the floor above that nobody noticed over a bank holiday weekend. By the time anyone got in on the Tuesday, the live server was dead, and so was the backup drive sitting on the shelf underneath it.
Same room. Same water. Same afternoon.
That’s the entire argument for offsite cloud backup in one sentence: if your backup lives in the same building as the thing it’s backing up, it isn’t really a backup. It’s a second copy of the same risk.
The 3-2-1 rule exists for exactly this reason
You’ve probably heard of it. Three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one of those copies kept somewhere else entirely. It’s not a new idea, and it’s not ours, but it’s stood the test of time because it covers the failure modes that actually happen: a drive dying, a ransomware strain that spreads to every mapped network location it can find, or, yes, a leak from the floor above.
The “two different media” part gets talked about a lot. The “one copy offsite” part is the one businesses skip, usually because it sounds like it needs its own IT project. It doesn’t. That’s what offsite cloud backup is for; a copy of your data that lives somewhere else, automatically, without anyone having to remember to take a drive home at the end of the day.
What offsite cloud backup actually means
Strip away the marketing and it’s simple: your data, copied on a schedule, to a data centre that isn’t yours. If your building has a bad day, fire, theft, flood, or a ransomware infection that reaches your local backup target, the offsite copy is untouched because it was never in the blast radius to begin with.
How you get it depends on what you’re already running:
- Already on Veeam? Point it at a cloud repository and keep using Veeam exactly as you do now. Nothing changes for you day to day, the copy just lands somewhere else.
- Prefer to run your own backup tooling? Object storage (S3-compatible) lets you point pretty much anything at a UK-hosted bucket and control the process yourself.
- Want something more bespoke? A virtual server with storage attached works if you’d rather build the setup than adopt someone else’s.
We cover all three in more detail on our offsite backup page, including where each one makes sense.
The bit people worry about: cost and access
Two questions come up every time. First: is this going to be expensive? Not particularly. Offsite storage is priced per TB, and that’s usually the only number people budget for. What catches people out is the second charge some providers don’t lead with: egress and ingress fees, a cost every time data moves in or out of storage. That means every restore, every DR test, every time you actually use the backup you’re paying for, costs extra on top. A cheap-looking price per TB can turn into an expensive bill the one time you need to pull your data back.
We don’t think that’s fair, so we don’t do it. No egress or ingress fees on any offsite backup option. Moving data in and out of storage costs the same as leaving it there: nothing extra. A DR test should never be something you think twice about running because of what it’ll cost you in transfer fees.
Second: if we need it, can we actually get it back quickly? A backup you can’t restore under pressure isn’t much use. Worth asking any provider, not just us, how fast a real restore actually is, not the marketing number.
The building doesn’t care how good your local backup is
The uncomfortable truth is that most local backup setups are genuinely fine, right up until the moment something happens to the building they’re sitting in. Offsite cloud backup isn’t about distrust of your local setup. It’s about making sure one bad afternoon can’t take out both copies at once.
If your current backup lives in the same room, the same rack, or even just the same postcode as your live data, it’s worth twenty minutes to work out what an offsite copy would actually cost you. Usually it’s less than people expect.
Talk to a UK engineer about getting your data offsite, or read about our Veeam Cloud Connect and S3 object storage options directly.
Reader Interactions