World Backup Day on March 31

March 31 has been declared World Backup Day to remind us to protect digital documents as we’ve become more reliant on technology.

With so much of our lives, photos, and videos being stored in digital form, it is important that we begin to make backups of our data. Backing up your data is one of those easy-to-do procedures that many people ignore.

People create and generate over 1.8ZB of data per year.¹ That’s a lot of data that we need to protect! Unfortunately, nearly 30% of people have never even backed up their data.² Backing up your data will protect your life’s work when that HDD fails. If you are a SMB, a backup can be what saves your company. World Backup Day is here to make sure that people actually start backing up.

World Backup Day can be observed by spreading the word of data integrity and automatic backup. Share World Backup Day with all your friends and family. The virtues of both local and offsite backup sites should be extolled. People should relay and take heed of the tales of devastating data disasters like the loss of an entire season of a children’s television series³ or the near complete loss of customer data by Microsoft’s & T-Mobile’s Sidekick.⁴ Even Pixar accidentally lost nearly 90% of the animated film Toy Story 2 to an errant computer command.⁵ So sad, all they needed was a proper backup plan that included regularly testing the data restores.

And to all the IT professionals saying “Hoho! I’m good. I already got backups.” 

Then March 31st is a day to tell your bosses and colleagues about the importance of backups. If you are a SMB, then a data disaster can be the end your company.

Ever heard of the bookmark sharing site called Mag.nolia? Of course you didn’t, they suffered a catastrophic data disaster and had to shut down when they lost both their primary and backup data stores.

Already have a backup procedure in place? If you don’t, consider making a plan to protect your data. One should also check (and then recheck) your backup restores on World Backup Day to see if they actually work. After all, a backup plan that doesn’t work isn’t much of a backup plan.

A word from the founder of World Backup Day
“I’m thrilled with the response to World Backup Day, and I hope it’s made a difference in people’s lives,” said World Backup Day founder Ismail Jadun. “We all know someone who has lost critical data, whether it was their videos, photos, music, book reports, or personal stuff. Hopefully this day will make everyone think about their situation, learn about the various options and get their files backed up. I hope that World Backup Day sparks conversations about the enormous task of saving our digital heritage for future generations.“

About World Backup Day
World Backup Day was chosen to be the day before April 1 (April Fools) in order to drive the message that one should backup all those pictures, spreadsheets, love letters, cat pictures, and important financial documents before it’s too late.

Key points about backing up data from WorldBackupDay.com:

• Items to backup: Your computer, laptop, phone, iPod, tablet, other wireless devices, photos and videos on social networks.
• Common ways to lose data: Theft, hardware failure, natural disaster, alien invasion, obsolete file formats, you forgot where you put it (really, it has happened).
• Backup options: Backing up is easy. Once set up, your data should be backing up automatically. There are two main types of backup solutions:
  • Local backup: An external HDD that can be retrieved at home.
  • Cloud/offsite backup: An online backup service or HDD securely placed in a different location
  • Having both local and offsite backups gives you piece of mind knowing your files are safe and secure.

If you are working in a business:

• Tell your bosses and colleagues about the importance of data backups
• Check your backup procedures and restores to make sure everything is up-to-date and working
• If don’t have one, consider creating a company data backup and continuity plan

World Backup Day Flyers

¹ Extracting Value from Chaos, IDC Digital Universe study
² Backblaze Survey Says: Apathy is Winning
³ Zodiac Island data: Lawsuit claims fired data center worker wiped out TV show
⁴ T-Mobile: Microsoft Lost All the Sidekick Backups
⁵ Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production?
⁵ How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good