The 31st of March is World Backup Day, a day where people all over the world are encouraged to not only remember to perform regular data backups, but to remind them as to why they should do it.

Because despite the concerted efforts of technologists, writers (like ourselves) and an entire industry of storage makers and sellers, it’s still the case that most of us don’t backup our data regularly. It’s silly really – the one thing that’s guaranteed in a computer or phone’s life is that it will one day fail, and yet we still get caught out as if it’s an unexpected thing when it happens, and lose precious files and memories forever.

Even professional photographers, whose data is literally their livelihood, don’t all perform regular backups of the thousands of photos and videos they shoot, according to a new survey by the UK’s Royal Photographic Society.
Somewhat shockingly, over 25% of the 1800 photographers surveyed indicated that they’ve had some sort of data loss involving their home computers or smartphones.

Even worse, one in five admitted they don’t back their data up regularly because they’re either “too lazy” or “it takes too long”. A full third of them said they’ve never done any sort of backup of their smartphones or tablets, even though those devices are vulnerable to accidental drops and theft.

The photographers surveyed stored an average of 220 000 photographs each. The worst losses included over six years of work, precious family photographs and even wedding pictures. Losses were attributed mostly to hardware failure, followed by software corruption, accidental damage, malware infections and theft.

Backups that last a thousand years

For those who’d like a backup medium that lasts beyond the ten or so years of the average external hard drive, writeable Blu-ray discs are a brilliant option. Verbatim’s latest writeable Blu-ray discs can store a maximum of 100GB each, and are rated to last “in excess of 1000 years”, according to the company’s Manny Cross.

Blu-ray discs are often overlooked as a backup medium, but bit for bit not only are they cheaper than external hard drives, it’s easy to buy extra discs to increase your overall storage in a way that would be costlier in USB media.

The 3-2-1 rule

If you’re serious about backups, and you should be, the way to do it properly is to follow the ‘3-2-1 rule’ of data loss prevention. The 3-2-1 rule says that you should make at least three copies of your data on two different types of media (so one in the cloud, one on a set of Blu-ray discs for example). You should also keep the various backups in more than one location.

That way, should your house burn down/get burgled/wiped out by a natural disaster, your data will remain safe at the second site.

Make every day World Backup Day

These are all very good points to keep in mind when it comes to data safety, not just on this World Backup Day, but every day. Check out all the options available from Verbatim here.

And lastly, here’s the lowdown on data backup according to Verbatim’s research: