When it comes to a marketing a product or service, it’s become popular for people to say it’s about the “brand”. This is especially true as to how it fits with the company’s reputation or image.

Often times, it’s a clever way to get us to buy whatever it is that the company is selling.

In a way, that’s (kind of) how World Backup Day got started.

Celebrated annually on March 31^st, World Backup Day was first introduced – as World Backup Month – in 2005 by Maxtor, a company known for manufacturing hard drives. While it’s not clear as to how long or just how effective their marketing campaign might’ve been, you can see what they were trying to do.

From there, it would be a few years later, in 2011, when the celebration of World Backup Day, you might say, became official after a student, Ismail Jadun – who was discussing backups on Reddit – jokingly created what is now recognized as, you guessed it, World Backup Day!

Putting aside its humorous origins, losing your files is something that happens way more frequently than you might think. And as we’ve come to discover, whether you’re at work, at home, or at school, even a momentary interruption in protecting your data can have a profound impact in our daily life.

In fact, according to a recent survey, published in the Disaster Recovery Journal, found that 74 percent of Americans who own a computer have accidently deleted important data – that’s an increase of nearly six percent from 2023 and 57 percent said they’ve experienced a security incident on their computer.

As concerning as that is, you can use the occasion of celebrating World Backup Day by implementing what is known as the “3-2-1 backup rule” that’s defined as:

• Keeping three copies of your data: the original and two backups.
• Storing your backups on two different types of media, such as a cloud service and an external hard drive.
• Making sure to keep at least one copy of your critical data stored offsite, either at a different location or a different cloud service.

As you make sense of it all, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) offers an informative guide that’ll not only give you a sense of the problems that can occur from improperly storing your data, it provides several solutions on what you should do, in the way of recommended best practices, and why it’s important to help you reduce the risk of experiencing any sort of permanent data loss.

What's more, CISA recommends that before setting up different types of encryption solutions, it offers several key steps to ensure that you don’t disrupt the access you already have in place to protect your own data.

As with a lot of the things we should do, especially as it involves our technology, it can be tough, at times, to stay on top of all of the system and software updates that, seemingly, come through at all hours of the day and night on our laptops and mobile devices, including our cell phones. And, sometimes, that’s true, even if we’ve scheduled a lot of that to go through at night, either when we’re asleep at home, or after we’ve left work for the day.

The truth is, if we take the time to celebrate World Backup Day throughout the year and make it a part of our daily routine, we’ll be able to say we did it “for the brand”, keeping our good name, reputation, and our personal and financial data (and that of our company’s) away from the reach of cybercriminals!