How will you celebrate World Backup Day?

World Backup Day (WBD) is March 31, which means it's a good time to be thinking and talking about backup, data protection, and recovery.

WBD history

World Backup Day was founded in 2011 by Youngstown State University student Ismail Jadun, after he and his fellow "redditors" were discussing the need for backups.  He decided that the day before April Fool's Day was the perfect time to spread the word about protecting data, and he started the official website.

World Backup Day considers backup to be " a second copy of all your important files — for example, your family photos, home videos, documents and emails. Instead of storing it all in one place (like your computer), you keep another copy of everything somewhere safe."  It sounds simple, but the world loses a surprisingly large amount of data each year. While there is no precise number, one recent report from an insurance company found that malicious attacks accounted for one-third of data loss in 2015.  Another report focusing on SaaS found that user error was the leading cause of data loss from SaaS applications.  A third survey found that 32% of businesses have lost data during system upgrades or migrations.

The three surveys mentioned above do not give us a full picture of worldwide data losses, but they do help us understand that data loss can happen for several different reasons.

What would you do if you lost everything? from Sam Mularczyk on Vimeo. 

Like all technology, data protection has changed in the last eight years.  Since the first World Backup Day, organizations have been using magnetic tape, optical disk, flash drives, hard drives, purpose-built backup appliances, and public cloud.  Like all IT solutions, legacy backup technologies have given way to new solutions that offer opportunities to lower costs while still meeting recovery point and recovery time objectives.   While we still have some organizations running manual backups as desired, many companies have automated solutions that replicate backups and alert admins when something goes wrong.

Barracuda data protection solutions

Barracuda's data protection solutions have also changed over the last eight years.  We've added Backup-as-a-Service, Cloud to Cloud Backup, and we've included backup and archiving in Barracuda Essentials.  This is a complete data protection solution and one of our most popular products.

 

What you can do to celebrate World Backup Day

Individuals and IT departments can benefit from spending a few minutes thinking about data protection this week:

• Test your current backup solution.  Is it working?  Are the backups current?  Are you backing up all of your important data?


• Think about the common ways you might lose data.  Theft, hardware failure, natural disaster, malicious attack, user error, etc.  Are you protected from these incidents?


• Talk to your friends and colleagues about the importance of data backup.  Help them protect themselves.


• If you do not have a data protection strategy for your company, take steps to create one.


• Join the social conversation on Twitter @worldbackupday and on Facebook here.

Test drive Barracuda data protection solutions with a free 30-day trial here.