World Backup Day Is A Reminder To Back Up Your World

I have been writing about World Backup Day on March 31 for several years. This day promotes backing up and saving your data. This year I had a reason to be glad that I make efforts to back up my data, because I had to recover from a computer failure, but even so, I didn’t get everything back. Having your data protected is important for your peace of mind, but also know how to recover your applications that allow you to use your data.

I back up my computers to the cloud as well as local time machine backups (I have Mac computers). About two months ago I had problems with a time machine backup—it wasn’t connecting and backing up my computer. I was going to work on that external drive or buy a new one, but I was too busy and it didn’t happen in time.

Then one of my computers that I was backing up from died about a month ago, and I had to recover from that failure. I wasn’t able to use the time machine backups—the backup drive couldn’t be accessed. So, I recovered the computer with files from my online backup, but I didn’t have the applications backed up (which I would have had if I had been able to use my time machine backup).

I use two computers that share files through cloud storage and I have external backups from both computers in two different locations. In addition, one of the computers I back up using a cloud storage company, Backblaze. I generally leave the backup drives connected to my computers so they back up at least once a day.

Because I made these multiple efforts, I think I was able to recover my data on the computer that failed, but I still needed to install all the applications to be able to use many of my files. I am telling you about this experience to encourage you to back up your data regularly and in multiple ways in order to protect yourself and also know how to recover the applications that allow you to use your data.

My experience was at a smaller scale, but as Stephen Manley, CTO of Druva, said, “We used to say, it’s not about backup, it’s about recovery. Now it’s not about data, but applications.

How will you protect and recover your business applications?” Recovering your applications allows you to continue to use your recovered data, they need to be protected as well as your data.”

Many of you are vulnerable to losing valuable data. According to Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze, “Our research with the Harris Poll shows that in 2022, 67% of computer owners accidentally deleted something, and 54% suffered data loss—yet only 10% are backing up daily. World Backup Day helps remind people to take action now.”

According to some older data (2015) from Kroll Ontrack: 67 percent of data loss is caused by hard drive crashes or system failure, 14 percent of data loss is caused by human error and 10 percent of data loss is a result of software failure. According to a 2023 article, 70% of small firms go out of business within a year of a large data loss and the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. So, it pays to back up your data.

Rob Price, Director of the Field Security Office of Snow Software said that, “Backups represent the last line of defense for everything from fat fingers to state-sponsored attacks. The key, as ever, is to treat information assets according to their importance to your business and manage risk accordingly.” Jason Konzak, SVP at Flexential said, “Without proper backups and incident response plans, businesses are unable to recover data effectively and efficiently, putting long term business success on the line.”

Ravi Pendekanti, SVP of HDD Product Management and Marketing at WDC recommends following the 3-2-1 rule for data backup. This is to have three copies of your data with one as primary backup and with two other backup copies. Save copies of your backups on two different types of storage media or devices and one of these backup copies should be kept offsite in case of disaster.

In addition to these failures, we might also lose access to data from malware. According to Aron Brand, CTO of CTERA, “By relying on periodic backups, typically daily, and slow, manual restore processes, we are left vulnerable to potential data loss, prolonged downtime, and significant business disruption. That’s why we need to shift to cyber-resilient storage solutions that offer continuous backup and instant rollback. These solutions allow us to proactively safeguard our data against ransomware and other cyber threats, minimize potential downtime, and quickly recover data with minimal impact on business operations.”

Lisa Erikson, head of data protection product management at Veritas said, ““In a recent Veritas survey of 2,000 US consumers, 78% said they’re concerned that the governments and businesses that have their personal information will be victims of ransomware or other attacks targeting sensitive data. Adding to their stress, nearly half (48%) also said they don’t trust these governments and businesses to adequately back up their digital information so it can be recovered after an attack.”

Steve Costigan, Field CTO of Zadera, said, “Find partners who can help you solve these challenges [data loss and malware] and give you the flexibility to change as your business evolves.” Many organizations have data on-premise and/or in the cloud and it often helps to have data protected and secure in multiple locations. Data in the cloud may be more vulnerable and the recovery times could be longer. Brian Spanswick, Chief Information Security Office and Head of IT at Cohensity also recommends that people should, “…store the backed up data in an immutable file so it can only be accessed by those with specific roles and privileges.”

Colm Keegan, Senior Consultant, Product Marketing at Dell Technologies said that, “72% of organizations reported in the GDPI research that they are unable to locate and protect dynamic data resulting from DevOps and cloud development activities. With

developers rapidly adopting containers to deploy workloads across on-premises and public cloud environments, consider solutions that can discover any workload type wherever it’s deployed so that you can automatically protect and secure data in real-time.” Finding dynamic applications and backing them up with their data is an increasing challenge.

Monitoring data before backup may also help in data recovery (and avoiding data loss through malware). According to Ken Barth, CEO of Catalogic Software, “Pre-backup monitoring and alerting for ransomware changes a backup team’s security posture from being reactive to ransomware to being proactive. Solutions that notify backup and storage teams of suspicious activity and pinpoint the extent of damage caused by cyber incidents are becoming must haves in the backup sector.”

According to Dr. Johannes Ullrich at the SANS Technology Institute, “One of the main reasons to invest in on-premise backups is to speed up recovery. Cloud and offsite backups will almost always be slower. In some cases, cloud backup providers may have mechanisms to accelerate the recovery of large amounts of data by shipping hard drives instead of using slower internet connections. Make sure you test recovery speed in order to better estimate how long it will take to recover large amounts of data.”

Also, different types of data may to treat different types of data differently to meet legal compliance requirements. According to Ben McLaughlin, VP of Lyve Cloud at Seagate Technology. “As part of their backup strategy, organizations need a unified data classification system to ensure that data is stored securely and in compliance with regulations, to help avoid regulatory fines and long-term reputation damage.”

Protecting our valuable data, whether personal or corporate, requires planning and action. You have to respond to changing conditions and threats and you need to plan to recover your applications, where ever they are, as well as your data. Don’t be an April Fool and start to protect your life and your livelihood now!