Getting ready for World Backup Day 2024

You might not have this noted on your calendar, but World Backup Day is this weekend. It’s a day meant to raise awareness of the importance of backing up your systems – both personal and professional (e.g., business) – to prevent data loss and the repercussions that would ensue with that loss.

Occurring every year on March 31, World Backup Day is meant to encourage individuals and businesses to commit to backing up their data in a way that ensures it can be recovered. That can mean not only doing a simple backup, but also backing up important data to multiple locations to protect it from loss and theft.

Ismail Jadun, a digital strategy and research consultant, started the annual campaign in 2011 to recognize the importance of trustworthy backups, and people and organizations are encouraged to take the World Backup Day pledge. Many companies will post reminders to staff, or provide podcasts about the importance of backing up data. It’s a day to review strategies and ensure that implemented measures are both working properly and checked periodically.

Carl D’Halluin, CTO of Datadobi, shared a reminder that “protecting your data with backups isn’t just a technical formality. Given the virtually unavoidable risks of ransomware, malicious or accidental deletions, and countless other threats – it’s absolutely crucial for the health of your business.” He also stressed that you need to understand the nature of your data, and that you can’t protect your data if you don’t understand what it is that you’re protecting. He strongly suggests “adding to that the crucial but sometimes missed step of a ‘golden copy'” (i.e., an immutable copy of your business-critical data in a secure and remote site) to support business continuity.

Oleksandr Maidaniuk, vice president of technology at Intellias, stated that “data is the virtual lifeblood of today’s organizations”, so as World Backup Day 2024 rolls around, we need to appreciate how crucial regular data backups are for keeping our businesses running without interruption, even in the face of a simple outage or a manmade or natural disaster.” He added: “implementing a seamless backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategy is easier said than done, due to the complicated interplay of technological, regulatory, and operational factors. The heterogeneous nature of data and technology platforms and the increasingly complicated and stringent compliance mandates combined with the need to minimize – if not eliminate – downtime requires a nuanced approach.”

For Linux in particular, data protection involves understanding the nature of your file systems (e.g., company data vs OS and configuration file), backing them up reliably, and ensuring that the backups are successfully completed. And there’s another important step: ensuring that your tech staff is ready and able to recover data in case of a loss. In fact, practicing data recovery, as in the style of a “fire drill,” from time to time is a very good idea.

Reviewing your backup strategies and running annual (if not more frequent) checks of policies and practices is also an extremely useful thing to do.