What is World Backup Day?
World Backup Day is a campaign to bring awareness to the importance of backups in the modern age, and to highlight to people the large number of active services out there that do not have sufficient backups, or any backups at all.
The campaign runs every year on March 31st.
What are backups?
A backup is another copy of your data, which could be anything from web server files, to a critical finance application, to your sensitive HR data.
There can be local and remote backups, with an ideal solution having both. Local backups are hosted on the same system and allow for a quick recovery in the event of a deleted file for example.
Remote backups are more important to have as they provide a backup copy hosted on a different system, ideally at a different site. If your live system goes down through disk failure, malware attack or a datacentre fire, your data can still be restored.
After a fire in March 2021 at the OVH Cloud datacentre in Strasbourg the company CEO Octave Klaba advised customers to “activate their disaster recovery plans.” Many customers seemed unaware that their services were not backed up by their provider automatically.
So how do I backup my data?
Fraction Servers always advises customers to take an external backup and ideally a local backup in addition to this to allow for quick restores. You should always know the location of your data and do not presume your provider takes backups offsite for you.
Before you backup your data, you need to decide two things, how you will backup your data and where it will be stored.
Popular options include using Veeam Backup and Replication to take a full image backup of your server to a remote Veeam server. Another popular choice for cPanel/WHM users is to use the built in backup software to backup to external NAS.
Statistics on Backups
Many people believe a disaster (be it man-made or mother nature) will never happen at their workplace. And, as a result, are quite lax about making sure they have the appropriate technology to support their business. The below are recent statistics on data loss and backup that might make you re-think this!
- 96% of all business computers are not being backed up with one in ten being infected with viruses each month.
- From companies that have suffered catastrophic data loss: 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years
- 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more during a disaster, entered liquidation within one year of the disaster
- 113 phones get lost or stolen every minute
- 30% of people have never backed up their data with the number one IT priority for mid-market organisations over the next 12 months is to improve data backup and recovery.