World Backup Day is March 31st: Do it Now.

According to IDC, people now create and generate more than 1.8 zettabytes of data per year, so there’s plenty of data to lose. Yet, there are still huge numbers of businesses and individuals that don’t back up their data regularly. How many? Nearly 30% of consumers have never backed up their data, and of those that did, 20% hadn’t backed up the data on their computers even once in 2019. While individuals may be risking their precious personal files, businesses may be risking their very existence. With an average 53% of a business’s sensitive files accessible to every employee, a majority are vulnerable to accidental, disastrous deletions, or worse, malicious internal or external attacks. That brings us to World Backup Day. It’s a special day to spread the word about data integrity and automating backups. It’s a day to take action (and if you’re reading this after March 31, it’s still not too late). Whether you’re an individual or a business, here are some things to think about

Backup Best Practices for Individuals

For individuals, don’t just think about backing up your computer. You need to protect your data on all of your devices—laptops, phones, tablets, and other wireless devices—and you need to automate it, so you don’t have to think about it.  At a minimum, back up to an external hard drive. That makes your data easy to retrieve if disaster strikes. But drives can fail, so back up your data to a cloud-based service, too, if you can. And, for complete confidence, where possible, back up your data to a local external drive, a cloud backup service, and to a second, securely-placed remote hard drive. That’s three layers of protection for your precious data!

Backup Best Practices for Business

For every business, World Backup Day is the perfect day to review all of your backup procedures and make sure everything is up to date. That includes reviewing or creating a company backup and disaster recovery plan to ensure it covers all of your current and projected needs. While 95 percent of enterprises are more likely to have disaster recovery plans and backup solutions in place, many may have outdated legacy systems that don’t fully protect data and may make recovery difficult. Even worse, 23 percent have never tested their plans to see if it actually works! Even companies that are confident in their backups can run into disasters. The World Backup Day website drives this point home by sharing the Pixar story, where nearly 90 percent of the data from the animated film Toy Story 2 was lost to an errant computer command. If it can happen to Pixar, it can happen to anyone. Plus, we’ve all read about companies that never recovered from data disasters. So, if you’re in IT or are in any way responsible for your enterprise’s data security, talk to your team. Review each of your backup procedures and your disaster recovery plans and test them. Also, make sure you’ve got the technologies in place to automate backups so they’re always current. But don’t forget, backups are just half the story. Make recovery fast and easy with a reliable data protection and disaster recovery solution, like ShadowProtect from StorageCraft. Whether you’re an individual, a small or large business, or any kind of organization that cares about its data, don’t be an April Fool. Backup today.