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World Backup Day is right around the corner! While I’ve known about this holiday for years, I was not familiar with its origins until recently. So I figured I would back up this knowledge (see what I did there?) by sharing it.

It was originally launched in 2005 by Maxtor, a hard drive manufacturer that would later be acquired by Seagate Technologies. The difference is, it was introduced to be “World Backup Month.” It wasn’t until 2011 when some redditors got together and created World Backup Day. While important to IT professionals, it was originally developed 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.

Granted, as a technology professional, you probably don’t need a holiday to remind you to back up. You’re probably doing this constantly. But, it is a good occasion to remind the users you support that this is not just a good practice, but an essential one.

Are you doing anything in celebration of World Backup Day to keep your organization not just safe, but also informed?

Learn more and find other great content on our World Backup Day page:

https://community.spiceworks.com/holidays/worldbackupday

Do you follow the 3-2-1 backup rule?
  • Of course
  • Sort of
  • Not at all
  • Using the updated 3-2-1-1 Rule
  • The cloud has made this obsolete
  • What’s that?
0 voters
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If you’re not familiar with the 3-2-1 Backup Rule, it was a concept originally shared in 2005 by Peter Krogh, a professional photographer, in his book, “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers.” Peter doesn’t profess to have invented the idea of three copies and offsite backup but distilled it down to what we referer to as the 3-2-1 Rule:

  • There should be 3 copies of data
  • On 2 different media
  • With 1 copy being off-site

While the rule is still relevant today, it was coined over 15 years ago and technology has changed a lot since then. How do you apply this rule to today’s world and how have you updated it?

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They added another “1” to that rule. They now call it the 3-2-1-1 Rule. Sort of like 11 is one more than 10. :sunglasses:

That last “1” in backup/marketing speak is to have one copy of your backup immutable.

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Funny enough, when I Google’d this, I ran across: The new 3-2-1-1 backup rule

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Now to blow your mind

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Wait, so does this mean that April 1st is World Restore Day?

Coz, in my experience, no one cares about the backups, they just care about the restores.

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For many shops I’ve worked in, backups are like an old toilet… jiggle the handle and hope the water stops running.

I’ve ways been diligent and made sure data restoration was 100% (which saved private and public company bacon on multiple occasions lol)

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I just backed up the pictures on my mobile phone. But that’s mainly because my phone is out of storage.

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Those crazy IT people, creating a World Back-Up Day on the last day of March, so you will not become an April Fool…

Someone had too much time on their hands and forgot to perform a critical back-up, so they came up with a ‘reminder’ for everyone else??

I just finished my tax preparation, and I’m looking for my 3.5" diskette to store my return on… Where did I put those 5 copies of that disk???

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Can we not do a world backup up and just start over?

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Backups are important. Even more important is testing them from time to time to make sure that they work.

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DAM!

If only WBD had been on March 1st! :frowning:

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I have two server rooms on site and in each server room I have a fire safe and a backup machine. Each backup machine backs up the servers onto it’s internal hard drives nightly then that is copied to tape which is held in the other server room fire safe.

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It is like the old saying goes:

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Same should go for backups too!

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I didn’t know the 3-2-1 rule was directly attributed to Peter Krogh, that was fascinating! I read his original DAM Book (for Digital Asset Management) and it was like a bible to me for managing my large and growing collection of photos. I got to meet him once at a Photoshop World conference, and got the updated version of his book, which I highly recommend for anyone that takes tons of pictures and wants to have them organized.

Chris.hone.5688 wrote: “I have two server rooms on site and in each server room I have a fire safe and a backup machine.”

Be careful, Chris, that sounds like you might have all of your eggs in one basket, in the form of your “site” if it is a single building. Make sure you have something located elsewhere in case of a physical disaster to your site.

TB33T wrote: “I just backed up the pictures on my mobile phone. But that’s mainly because my phone is out of storage.”

Ironically, this is how most phones get backed up. Based on presence here at Spiceworks, I assume you are aware of this already. I consider my phone, much as I love it, to be a disposable item. Not that I plan on disposing it, but because it could be killed at any time. My photos are automatically downloaded to Dropbox when I’m connected to wi-fi, and I also do it manually when I need the most recent ones.

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Google Photos also does a nice job of this, although by default it will reduce the size of the photos slightly. I believe Amazon also has similar photo backup solution.

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I’ve gotten many members of my family that use iPhones to add Amazon Prime photo backup to their devices. HEVC counts as video and is not free to backup, but still formats backing up with unlimited space is part of a regular Prime subscription. They still pay Apple, but at least they have a legitimate backup as well.

I pay $60/yr/GB for Prime storage to backup my OneDrive data, which isn’t really a good deal except it is automatic and pain free, so it’s a good deal.

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Genuinely curious - why do you feel you need two offsite backups? Especially at $60/GB(!), given the cost of multi-terabyte drives. EDIT: Think you meant $60/TB, looking at Prime’s plans :slight_smile:

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Geeze, can you tell I’m old? Yes, TB…GB used to be a lot, and I’m not talking about the Empire.

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