With Backup Day 2026 having come and gone, it seems like a good time to go back and look over the relevant topics. Why have a backup of your systems, anyways? Backups are viewed as an integral part of disaster recovery – something I’ve pushed before on this blog – but they have a role beyond security as well.
Last month, I booted up my personal PC after work and saw it enter a recovery screen instead of coming up normally. While I’d been away, one of the older hard drives I’d used for storage had bricked – no warning, no foreshadowing, just here one moment and gone the next. Did I have the files on it copied elsewhere? Take a guess.
For many organizations and individuals, backups are what you use to stave off ransomware or some malicious hacker creeping into your system. And that’s certainly one use, far from the least important one! But at the same time, it misses the far more common use. While cyberattack rates have risen, the most common source of data loss is still not linked to external threats.
Accidental deletion, hardware failure, corrupted data – all of these are far more common and far more prosaic pain points that a good backup helps alleviate.
Keeping backups for security and beyond
Worldwide, this week after World Backup Day, the numbers speak for themselves. Nearly 1 in 3 people have never backed up their data. While adoption for organizations is better, thanks in part to pressure by regulators, even there the numbers aren’t what they could be.
Part of this is inertia and simple convenience. But that’s no longer a sufficient answer. Certainly – it’s desirable you have the best backup possible, configured to adhere to best practices, airgapped, immutable and safe. But honestly?
Have any backup at all first.
Your Data In Your Hands – With TECH-ARROW
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