Today is World Backup day, and a reminder to backup and better protect your data

Today is World Backup Day, we emphasize it on a yearly basis to remind our readers about the importance of backing up your data! If you're new here, or just happen to avoid reading Neowin every March 31st, World Backup Day is "a day for people to learn about the increasing role of data in our lives and the importance of regular backups."

Think about it. How much personal data do you have on your phone? There's undoubtedly a bunch of photos and videos. How about your computer? Do you have any important tax documents? Excel spreadsheets and Word documents? Maybe you even have a Plex server filled with personal music and television shows?

Now imagine your phone is on your home network and gets infected with Ransomware. It encrypts everything on the device and then worms its way to everything it sees on your network, while also deleting all of your cloud storage. Your photos, videos, documents, and music are all encrypted. What would you do?

With a backup, it's important to have multiple copies of your data. At the very least, you want two copies of the data, but ideally you want at least three, with one copy stored in a separate building from where you live to protect against fire and natural disasters. You should also think about having an offline copy so that if you are hit with ransomware, it won't be able to destroy the offline copy.

Fortunately, it appears the message is getting across, last year it was estimated that 30% of people have never backed up their computer before, this year that estimate has dropped to 21%, or around a fifth of people. However, malware is becoming more prevalent, that estimate rose from 10% of computers infected with malware each month, to 30% of computers that are already infected with malware, that's a frightening prospect and perhaps a reminder to have an up-to-date malware protection — it could happen to you!

Of course World Backup Day is about more than just backing up data: It's also "a day to talk about the enormous task of preserving our increasingly digital heritage and cultural works for future generations." Think about your old 8mm film, or your MiniDV tapes that can only be read via FireWire, or your thesis paper you wrote using Word Perfect 5.1 on DOS and come up with a plan to modernize the information so that your future generations will be able to admire it, instead of simply finding a 5.25" plastic square, shrugging, and throwing it in the garbage.

If you already backup your data, share your strategy. If you have modernized your data, let us know how you did it. And if you haven't done either of these things, take the pledge to not only back up your data but to also modernize it.