India’s education sector faces an average of 8,487 cyberattacks per week, according to data from Check Point Research (CPR) 2026. Yet, conversations with students and faculty reveal a striking disconnect: everyone knows backups matter, almost nobody maintains them. This gap between awareness and action creates an invisible crisis across Indian campuses. Research papers get lost. Dissertations disappear. Years of fieldwork evaporate. Increasingly, ransomware attackers deliberately target educational institutions primarily because their backup practices are weak and they are easy targets.

Prime targets

When Unacademy suffered a data breach in 2020, 22 million user accounts were exposed through an unsecured database. In 2023, the government-operated Diksha app leaked 1.6 million teachers’ personal information through misconfigured AWS S3 buckets. The 2022 AIIMS-Delhi ransomware attack disrupted not just patient records but also medical education. Lecture materials, examination papers, and student assessment data became temporarily inaccessible during a critical academic period. All these incidents highlighted how academic institutionsoften have backup infrastructure weaker than mid-sized businesses.

False comfort

Most students believe they’re protected because their documents exist in Google Drive or OneDrive. This isn’t backup;it’s synchronisation. When a student accidentally deletes a file or when ransomware encrypts their local folders and those changes sync to the cloud, the “backup” becomes a perfect copy of the corrupted or deleted data.

Cloud platforms maintain version history, typically for 30 days. But discovering that critical academic work was accidentally overwritten usually happens during final submission chaos, often weeks after the damage occurred. By then, recoverable versions are gone.

Consider this: A final-year Engineering student lost three months of research data because their laptop hard drive failed two weeks before thesis submission. When asked, fewer than 20% of their classmates had any backup system in place for their own academic work. The response is uniform: “That’s why you should have backed up.” But nobody actually does.

Risks for educators

Faculty members accumulate even more critical data over decades: lecture materials refined over years, student grades and evaluations, research datasets that took months to collect, unpublished papers under review. Yet institutional backup policies rarely extend to individual faculty computers, creating a gap where decades of academic work exists only on aging laptops.

In one case, a Chemistry professor lost his exam questions because they were only on the office computer that crashed. A Humanities researcher lost interview transcripts because the backup drive sat next to the laptop that was stolen, making it not just an additional target.

The problem compounds because educators frequently work across multiple devices: office desktop, personal laptop, home computer. Important files scatter across locations with no systematic backup connecting them.

Modern ransomware doesn’t just encrypt your files;it actively hunts for backups to destroy first. Attackers spend days inside networks before deploying encryption, specifically targeting backup repositories, shadow copies, and cloud storage connections. If your backup drives are permanently connected and accessible, they’re not really backups;they’re just additional targets.

Educational institutions face a cruel calculation during placement season or final submissions: pay the ransom to recover student records immediately, or spend weeks reconstructing data while students miss critical deadlines. Many institutions quietly pay rather than admit their backup failures.

3-2-1 rule

The solution remains straightforward: three copies of your data on two different types of media, with one copy off-site. For students and educators, this translates practically to:

Primary copy: Your working files on laptop or desktop

Second copy: Automated local backup to external drive (disconnected when not backing up)

Third copy: Cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox) with versioning

The keyword is “automated”. Manual backups fail because humans forget. Many modern security solutions include scheduled backup features as part of their anti-malware protection.Configure them once, verify quarterly, and let automation handle the rest.

Digital literacy

Perhaps the real solution is to “educate the educator” to make backup literacy as essential as plagiarism awareness or citation practices. First-year orientation should include not just college tours and integrity lectures, but practical sessions on protecting academic work. Show students how to configure automated backups. Explain why cloud sync isn’t sufficient. Demonstrate recovery procedures.

Colleges invest in learning management systems and digital libraries. Similar investment in ensuring students and faculty can actually protect the work they create would prevent far more data loss than expensive storage infrastructure. The question isn’t whether an institution will face a data loss incident. It is whether the backups will actually work when they need them.

The writer is CEO and Managing Director, eScan.