We’ve heard news stories of data breaches at corporations.

Too many of us have had at least one notice of our secure data being captured by the ever-increasing threat of ransomware and viruses.

Yet, most of us haven’t ever heard of World Backup Day unless we’ve worked in a tech field.

Way back when computers were first entering the world of education, I taught computer literacy.No, not computer science. I’m not a techie. I have no formal computer science training.

I taught seventh and eighth-grade students word processing, databases, spreadsheets, and basic programming. That gave me a healthy appreciation for backups and protecting data.

In the early onset of computing, we used external discs for storage, and I promise there is nothing sadder in the world than a twelve or fourteen-year-old whose disk went missing or became corrupt and all their work lost.

To this day, I have backups of backups following the  3-2-1 rule.

  • Three copies of everything
  • Stored on two different pieces of media,
  • One of which is off-site and immutable.

I back up daily. All my published books have a zip drive along with at least one hard copy. Personal files are saved to an external drive. I use multiple cloud storage services, zip drive USBs, and print critical files.

Like I said, I believe in backing up and not just one day a year.

Do you back up your data?

We can’t be responsible for corporations or other places where our data resides, but personal computer data is our responsibility.

That’s why I’m sharing this infographic about World Backup Day from the University of Washington.