How Do You “Celebrate” World Backup Day?

March 31st is officially “World Backup Day“, a day that is intended to raise awareness of the need for constant and diligent data protection. So what does one do on World Backup Day? For many, the answer may be “nothing special” since they’re already backing up their data daily or better. For others, they may be looking at how to start or improve backups for their home or small business, and that’s great because in today’s digital world everyone has something that’s worth keeping. Now, if you’re reading my blog posts, then you probably already have backups in place, and maybe even data replication and other availability tools. So, what do you do on World Backup Day?

My recommendation? Test your recovery process. While World Backup Day is a great reason to test your backups, to be honest, I’d recommend you do it more than once a year. Backups are not worth a thing if you can’t use them to recover your data. Making a backup plan in the easy part, and it’s easy to walk away at just that. With any luck, you’ll never need more than that security blanket of knowing that you have a copy of your data. Don’t be caught discovering that you can’t recover your data when you really need it though. Remember, it’s “backup and recovery”, and you can’t have one without the other.

Another good thing to consider is what’s known as the “3,2,1 Rule” of backups. In short, you should have three copies of your data, across two different media types, with at least one copy off-site. With the number of cloud-based storage and cloud-based backup options available today, this is something that ever company from small to large should be able to accomplish easily. Consider, at the very least, backing up your data locally and replicating that into the cloud or a second data-center if you have one available.

One other “rule” that I recommend keeping in mind is the “X-1″ rule of data backups. That is to always assume that you have one less copy of your data than you think you do. Storage fails, recovery fails, and something always goes wrong. So, if you have three copies of your data, trust that you can count on two. If you have only two copies of your data, trust that you have only one. If you have only copy of your data, well, you’re going to get burned. This is really an extension, or a foundation, of the 3,2,1 Rule above, but it is a good thing to remember when you’re planning out your backup (and recovery!) processes.

There are many good backup options out there. Some of them are even free or ridiculously inexpensive, especially those suited for home and small businesses. Recovery as a Service (RaaS or DRaaS) is a common MSP offering for SMB’s, as well high-availability and failover to the cloud. Given the high cost of business downtime, and the potentially fatal consequences of data loss, there is really no reason not to have invested in a good backup policy for your business critical data and applications.

Today is World Backup Day. Don’t let another day go by without backing up your data. Technology moves fast, things do break, and data can be lost in the blink of an eye. Don’t lose what’s important to you. In the words from an old 80′s television show, “Let’s be careful out there.”

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