Preserve Your Data: Why Every Day Should Be World Backup Day

If you work in technology, you may have heard about World Backup Day. Founded in 2011, World Backup Day was conceived by Ismail Jadun, a digital strategy and research consultant, to boost awareness for businesses and individuals who don’t recognize the importance of regular data backups. According to the World Backup Day website, the goal is to use March 31 as the date each year to reach people who have never backed up their data and even those who might not have heard about data backup at all.

According to Jadun, the idea for World Backup Day came from an incident where someone on Reddit lost their hard drive and complained that they wished someone had reminded them to back up. Since then, reactions to the annual reminder have been universally positive.

“I’m thrilled with the response to World Backup Day, and I hope it’s made a difference in people’s lives,” Jadun says. “I hope that World Backup Day sparks conversations about the enormous task of saving our digital heritage for future generations.”

One company that consistently promotes World Backup Day is Carbonite, an analytics and endpoint protection services company and a subsidiary of OpenText Cybersecurity. In a blog post, Carbonite points out that 18% of people have never backed up their data. It notes that 67% of data loss is caused by accidents, including hard drive crashes and system failure. Worse, 70% of small businesses that experience a data loss incident go out of business within one year of the event.

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What You Need to Know About Data Loss

Don’t think of data loss as something that only happens to massive companies or individual employees who drop phones in swimming pools. Anyone can fall victim to data loss. As much as we like to trust our technology purchasing decisions, someone will always fall on the losing end of hard drive failure rates, and accidents do happen.

Cyberattacks are another probable cause for data loss. For example, in 2023, victims of ransomware attacks reportedly paid $1.1 billion in extortion fees to regain access to their data, nearly double the figure from the previous year. And despite the availability of ransomware protection software, many individuals and businesses alike don’t fully understand the risk. Once ransomware uses encryption to lock away your files and data without a key, the losses can be as catastrophic as those in an uncontrolled fire.

For businesses, in particular, the cost of major data loss events may be far greater than the cost of backup and recovery solutions. And for individuals, potentially losing precious personal documents, photos, and video should be enough to make backup a priority.

(Credit: Getty Images/boonchai wedmakawand)

How to Stay Safe

Observing basic backup procedures is crucial for any computer user, but as Carbonite points out, the risk to businesses is greater. Businesses must create a simple, company-wide data protection policy that automatically backs up the endpoint data to the cloud. The solution should be friction-free for the employees and not require the employees to do anything. Furthermore, if your company lacks the resources for a corporate-wide backup plan, you should start with senior leaders’ laptops (a smaller group that holds the most sensitive data).

It’s also crucial for companies to audit the data they produce, including customer data, product data, HR data, and sales data, among many other examples. By doing this, you can better understand the stakes of any data loss your company might experience. Once you’ve audited your data, you should determine the potential ways data could be lost and create a protection plan to prevent such incidents.

Depending on how much downtime your organization can handle, it should look at various data protection and backup solutions. Your business should strongly consider creating local backups, as well as backups in an offsite location. Then set protocols to both automatically back up and test those restores regularly.

Juan Martinez also contributed to this story.