Don't be an April Fool, backup your files on World Backup Day

world backup day

Have you given any thought as to what would happen if you lost your phone? What if your laptop was infected with ransomware? Have you analyzed and figured out what data is important and, more importantly, how to keep it protected? It's the goal of World Backup Day, "celebrated" on March 31st every year, to bring attention to the idea that many people don't think about their data until it's too late.

According to the World Backup Day website, just under a fifth of people have never backed up their data, despite Cloud storage being a regular thing in comparison to five years ago. A staggering 113 phones are lost or stolen every 60 seconds. While many people have online backup services from Microsoft, Apple, and Google that are mostly free and automatically copy data from their phone, a large number of people don't bother to set it up, don't think about what data to have copied, or simply don't understand the capabilities. In addition, there are often limits to the amount of data that can be stored, and photos are frequently reduced in quality in order to save space.

We're sure most of our readers have a good handle on what data they need to backup and have reliable solutions in place. However, it's probably a good idea to take the day to talk to your less technical friends about the potential issues and some solutions, whether it be a NAS device from companies like Synology and QNAP, cloud solutions, or offsite backups. Some solutions, such as local NAS devices, even allow you to set up snapshots so that if ransomware hits your network, you can still go back in time to save your data.

Even if you do have backups, make sure you test them on a regular basis (perhaps every World Backup Day!). As a smart sysadmin once told me, "Nobody cares about backups. Everyone cares about restores."