The Growth and Importance of World Backup Day

Backing up your data is a simple but essential step to protecting what matters – whether that’s your personal photos, videos, emails, and apps, or your corporate website, years of customer information, and product data.

Unfortunately, 24 percent of people and 36 percent of businesses don’t back up their devices at all – putting their most important files and personal information at risk from accidental deletions, hardware crashes, and ransomware attacks that can take down entire organizations for days. For all of those who aren’t regularly backing up their data, World Backup Day is the perfect reminder of how and why complete, regular backups deserve a place on the to-do list.

In 2011, the Reddit community developed World Backup Day as a “reminder to save all your cherished pictures, videos, and other important data to somewhere secure.” Soon after, the event had an official website, social media accounts, and an official date – March 31 – to remind people to back up or risk losing data and becoming an April Fool.

Since then, World Backup Day has become a globally recognized holiday with annual conversations on the importance of backup – and special deals from many hardware and software companies to mark the occasion.

Yet many still aren’t backing up their data, even though there’s more reason than ever to do so.

From the most casual computer user to the largest organizations, everyone stores irreplaceable information on their devices. Without regular backups, this information is vulnerable to both accidental and malicious data loss – threats that are only growing.

Right now the average American spends more than 11 hours each day on digital devices. They create, share, and store countless files with the world, opening themselves up to an increasingly dangerous digital landscape. Today it’s estimated that there’s a ransomware attack on businesses every 40 seconds and among personal users, they’re even more frequent. Additionally, given the rise in time spent on digital devices, it should come as no surprise that the amount of data being generated around the world is growing rapidly every day.

With this growth comes more incentive for cybercriminals to strike, more strain put on the hardware and software that stores and generates all this information, and a much higher likelihood that when things are lost or broken, the consequences will be more frustrating and costly than ever before.

Backups represent a simple, effective way to reduce these risks to the files, apps, and systems that make up your digital world.

Whether you’re a business owner, a personal user, or an IT service provider, Acronis makes it easy to protect what matters most with easy, reliable and secure solutions. With innovations like an integrated anti-ransomware defense powered by artificial intelligence, blockchain-based file notarization, and an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard, you can back up anything or everything on your devices in just a few clicks – keeping them completely safe, accessible, private, authentic, and secure.

The #1 personal backup software

• Easy: The easiest-to-use interface of any competitor. Just two clicks to a full image backup. And one more click to advanced configurations, scheduling, and detailed backup options.
• Efficient: The fastest backup and recovery. Up to 10x faster than the competition, whether the destination is a local drive, external drive, NAS device, network share, or in the cloud.
• Secure: The most secure backup. The only home backup with an AI-based anti-ransomware defense built-in to actively detect and stop attacks. Also automatically restores affected files.

The most reliable and easy-to-use backup for businesses of all sizes

• Easy: Get back to work easily by starting your backup as a VM - so quick that no one realizes there was a problem. Accelerate your recovery up to 2x by flexibly restoring servers or PCs to bare metal or dissimilar hardware.
• Efficient: Save money on infrastructure by leveraging on-premises or cloud deployment models for the management server. Retain 20 percent work hours with simplified administration, allowing IT generalists to perform backup tasks with minimal involvement. Save up to 10x with cloud storage adoption as your data/device population grows.
• Secure: One solution for 20+ platforms - physical and virtual, clouds, apps, and mobile. Eliminate ransomware attacks with built-in cyber threat protection - 200,000 unique attacks prevented. Ensure data integrity with our innovative blockchain-based technology which prevents attacks targeting archive files.

Backup as a service that delivers advanced cyber protection that’s packaged and priced for small infrastructures

• Easy: Offload maintenance and management to your cloud service provider instead of worrying about managing storage at an off-site location.
• Efficient: Outsource your corporate data protection to a trusted managed service provider (MSP) that has unique access to independent software vendor (ISV) trainings. They invest significant time to understand backup implementation procedures inside and out so you don't have to.
• Secure: Safeguard your data by keeping a copy off-site. By backing up corporate data remotely, you avoid simultaneously destroying both original data and backups should a physical disaster (like theft, fire, or flood) or digital danger (like a network-wide malware infection) occur.

With World Backup Day just weeks away, now’s the perfect time to take an active role in defending what matters. Whether you're protecting irreplaceable family photos and videos or your organization’s entire infrastructure, having complete, up-to-date backups stored both locally and in the cloud is an absolute necessity given today’s various threats.

Backups help ensure that you can quickly recover from any accidents, data breaches, and hardware problems that may impact your most important files, apps, and systems. So mark your calendars and make sure you’re protected this World Backup Day.