World Backup Day: 50% of people will never know their computer systems have been hacked

Now that your world has become increasingly digitalised – from photos and videos to music and podcasts to videogames and e-books, the importance of backing up your data can never be overemphasised.

With Thursday 31 March being World Backup Day, you need to ask yourself a very important question, are you backing up your files and how are you backing up?

In the current technologically advanced world, it’s never been more important than now to make sure your data across all your devices is backed up.

In 2020 people’s lives changed forever when working from home (WFH) became our reality due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Now, while some of people have returned to the office full time, many companies have adopted a hybrid working approach or are still working remotely and may not have considered how data is being secured while out of the office.

According to consulting company Bizmod the pandemic sent companies and employees into a tailspin. 

Whether it is from a personal or work perspective, the reliance on devices has increased ten-fold.

Bizmod explains that the complexity of managing a blended work and home life, has resulted in our work data ending up on our personal devices and vice versa. 

Photographs, discussions, and chats are now on smartphones, resulting in a backup strategy being imperative for your phone and laptop or PC.

The World Backup Day website shares some alarming statistics that will help to convince you to backup, if you aren’t already:

•            60% of backups are incomplete

•            50% of restores fail

•            20% of small businesses are likely to be hacked annually

•            20% of medium-sized businesses lose critical data once every five years

•            113 smartphones are lost or stolen every minute

•            29% of data loss cases are caused by accident

•            30% of all computers are already infected with malware

•            21% of people have never made a backup

Today’s smartphones no longer serve as purely a connection device but in many cases are an integral part of people lives.

Photographs, apps, passwords, emails, and chats are all stored on these devices.

Bizmod adds that losing your data is more common than many of us think.

If you haven’t done so already, make a small investment in a cloud subscription, backup your files to some of the easy-to-use online solutions such as – One Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive to name a few – or purchase an external hard drive and commit to regularly backing up all your data.

ALSO READ: Policing sector tops scale, representing 10% of overall corruption – report