April Fools' Day

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Tuesday, March 31, is World Backup Day. I have written a blog about World Backup Day and the importance of backing up your data to make sure it’s safe, and to fight off the evil forces of entropy, since 2014.

In prior blogs I have written about my personal experience recovering data after a computer failure. I have also written in the past about the 3-2-1 rule for data backup: have three copies of data, one primary and two backups, stored on two different types of storage media, such as a local hard disk drive and a NAS storage device or a tape drive, with one copy stored off-site, such as in a cloud storage service.

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.

Richard Copeland, CEO of Leaseware, USA agrees about the importance of the 3-2-1 rule, “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.”

Larry O’Conner, founder and CEO of Other World Computing, also emphasizes the value of multiple copies of data: “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.”

Don Boxley, CEO and co-founder of DH2i, said that in today’s world, simple backup may not be enough. “Backups are still incredibly important," he said, "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.” Fast failover is important as well as multiple copies of data to fail over to.

My own experience with recovering data after a computer failure, is not unique. Epson emphasizes that, “Whether it’s human error, a hardware mishap, cybercrime, theft or natural disaster, the chances that you or someone you know will lose important data or photos is extremely high. Despite these risks, many people neglect to back up the important things regularly as the perceived time, cost and process outweigh the urgency until a data loss or unfortunate event occurs.” Fighting against the forces of entropy that seek to destroy information takes some time and attention.

However, you can’t assume that just because you have copies of your data that you can quickly get them back. “Maybe March 31st shouldn’t just be a reminder," said Pawel Staniec, CTO of Catalogic Software. "It should be a fixed point in every organization’s calendar to actually run a recovery test, walk through the DR plan, and find out where the gaps are before an incident does it for you. The teams that treat it as an action item rather than an awareness day are the ones that won’t be scrambling when something goes wrong.”

With AI, making sure you have good data in your backups has increased urgency, so maybe this is another thing to check on March 31. “In today’s AI era, simple backups are not enough to achieve business resilience. In relation to AI, what modern organizations face today is less of a new attack surface, but more of a new cocktail of familiar risks in different combinations and permutations," said Nabil Hannan, field CISO at NetSPI. "To be resilient today, organizations must go beyond recovery and prove not only that backups exist, but that they remain trustworthy, and that systems cannot be manipulated to misbehave or cascade failures before security teams notice.”

Munu Gandhi, president of IT solutions at Xerox, makes a similar statement: “True resilience requires a modern strategy that integrates backup, security, and infrastructure across endpoints, data centers, and cloud environments—and the discipline to test recovery continuously.”

In 2026, HDDs and SSDs, often used for data backup, are in short supply due to the growth in demand of digital storage for AI workloads at hyperscale data centers. These popular storage products are sold out through 2026 and into 2027. Backup customers may want to consider other options, such as magnetic tape.

“Tape has been continuously innovating through all of this," said Skip Levens, quantum product leader and AI strategist and participant in the LTO magnetic tape program. "LTO-10 delivers up to 40 terabytes of native storage per media cartridge. Retrieval performance has improved to the point where tape functions as an active tier in the data pipeline, not just a cold archive you hope you never need… For AI workloads that don’t require sub-second latency, tape lets organizations scale their data, maintain resilience against supply disruptions, and keep long-term costs under control.”

March 31 is World Backup Day. Fight the evil forces of entropy and data vulnerability today and don’t become an April fool tomorrow.