The IT Nerd

World Backup Day was created in 2011 by Ismail Jadun, a digital strategy and research consultant. The idea came from a Reddit post from someone who lost their hard drive and said they wished someone had reminded them to back up their data. Jadun turned that idea into a global awareness campaign and set the date as March 31, the day before April Fool’s Day, with the message: “Don’t be an April Fool. Backup your data.” More info. on World Backup Day can be found here: https://www.worldbackupday.com/en/.

Several top figures in tech had this to say about this important day:

Larry O’Connor, Founder and CEO, Other World Computing (OWC) (https://www.owc.com/):

“World Backup Day is a good reminder that hoping your data is safe and actually protecting it are two very different things. If everything lives in one place, whether that’s a laptop or a single cloud account, you’re one mistake or outage away from losing something that might have taken years to create. The smartest approach we see people taking today is a mix of on-prem storage, cloud, and reliable backups so their work exists in more than one place. When your storage is fast and dependable, backing up just becomes part of the workflow instead of something you keep meaning to get around to.”

Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i (www.dh2i.com): 

“World Backup Day comes around every year for a reason. We all need an occasional reminder of the proactive actions we should be taking to protect the sensitive data our organizations are responsible for. Unfortunately, it’s still easy for this critical task to get pushed to the bottom of the list. Most organizations don’t think much about backups until the day something breaks. A drive fails, a server crashes, someone accidentally deletes the wrong thing. Suddenly, everyone realizes those files weren’t just data sitting somewhere. They were customer records, financial systems, months of work, sometimes years of it. When that disappears, it’s not just an IT problem. The business feels it immediately.

What’s changed over the last few years is just how dependent companies have become on their data being available all the time. Databases are running across Windows, Linux, containers, and multiple clouds, and everything is moving faster than it used to. Backups are still incredibly important… but they can’t be the whole strategy anymore. Businesses need systems that keep running even when something fails. And they need to know quickly when something is starting to go wrong. At the end of the day… backup is really about peace of mind. It’s about knowing that when something inevitably goes sideways, you’re not starting from zero trying to rebuild your business from scratch.”

Richard Copeland, CEO, Leaseweb USA (https://www.leaseweb.com/en/):

“World Backup Day provides a great reminder that protecting data isn’t just about copying files, and moving them somewhere else. It’s really about knowing exactly where your data lives and who has true control of it. Today’s backup strategies must respect data sovereignty, while adhering to the fundamentals that have always worked, like 3-2-1. That is, keep at least 3 copies of your data, on at least 2 unique storage devices, and store at least one copy offsite. Just as important is working with a provider that actually knows your environment and treats your data like it matters. When something goes wrong, you don’t want to feel like your business is one small account lost in a massive system. You want real expertise, real people, and a partner who understands that your data is the heartbeat of your organization.”

Roger Brulotte, CEO, Leaseweb Canada (https://www.leaseweb.com/en/): 

“World Backup Day is an ideal reminder that a good backup strategy still comes down to common sense. You want to maintain multiple copies of your data across different storage mediums, local and remote – because when something fails, and something always does – you can recover quickly without your business operations grinding to a halt. The next common sense strategy is, given today’s dynamic business environment and geopolitical tensions, to truly understand where your data physically resides, and under whose legal jurisdiction, in order to ensure you maintain full data accessibility while enforcing strict access control. And, when storing your data offsite, whether it is to protect it or increase business capabilities, make sure you’re not just a number in a massive system… that the provider truly understands your business and your unique data requirements, and provides the kind of hands-on, white-glove service you deserve.”

Jason Lohrey at Arcitecta

Conventional backup strategies were designed for a world of megabytes and gigabytes, not today’s environments where enterprises routinely managetens or even hundreds of petabytes and billions of files.Traditional backup assumes data grows slowly and that organizations can tolerate hours or even days before recovery begins. But for modern data-driven businesses, those assumptions are no longer realistic.

On a massive scale, the idea of simply backing up everything becomes unrealistic: traditional systems cannot move hundreds of terabytes per hour or scan billions of files fast enough to keep up with modern data growth.

As data volumes explode across hybrid infrastructures, from on-prem storage and cloud environments to distributed teams, the challenge isn’t simply making copies of data. Organizations must be able to recover the right data instantly when something goes wrong, whether due to ransomware, accidental deletion, or system failure.

To do this, data protection must become an integral part of the data platform itself. Organizations need to move beyond traditional backup strategies toward continuous data availability, where every change to data is recorded in real time and where data can be instantly restored to any point in time. By embedding protection directly into the data path, every file change — such as writes, deletions, or renames — can be captured as it happens, ensuring an organization can always recover its data quickly and effectively.

Mark Christie, Senior Director, Technical Services, StorMagic

“One shift we’re seeing in backup is how recovery expectations are changing as environments become more distributed. In the past, backup strategies were built around centralized systems and assumed that data could be restored back into the same environment. That assumption doesn’t always hold anymore.

For organizations running multiple sites or operating in environments with limited connectivity, the question is no longer just where data is backed up, but how quickly systems can be brought back online locally. If recovery depends on pulling large volumes of data from a central location, that can introduce delays at exactly the moment uptime matters most.

As a result, more teams are looking at backup and recovery together rather than separate processes. That includes keeping recent copies of data closer to where it’s used, validating recovery workflows across sites, and making sure critical applications can continue running even if the primary environment is unavailable.

World Backup Day is a good reminder that backup strategies need to reflect how systems are actually deployed. It’s not just about having a copy of the data. It’s about whether the business can keep operating when something goes wrong.”

Jimmy Tam, CEO, Peer Software

World Backup Day is a useful reminder, but the conversation has moved well beyond backup. In today’s always-on environment, organizations can’t rely on legacy data protection models built around backup windows—they need continuous availability. Business continuity now depends on redundant, active environments across locations, ensuring operations don’t stop even when infrastructure fails.

Backup was designed for a different era, where recovery time was acceptable. Today, recovery isn’t fast enough—availability is the priority. Whether it’s a regional outage, cloud disruption, or broader geopolitical risk, organizations need active-active architectures that keep data accessible and operations running without interruption.

Modern enterprises can no longer assume failure is acceptable as long as data can be restored. Resilience now means real-time redundancy and continuous access. Recent events have underscored that even large-scale cloud infrastructure isn’t immune to disruption, and backup alone doesn’t address that reality. Organizations need geographically distributed systems that ensure data is always available—because today, downtime isn’t just inconvenient, it’s unacceptable.