World Backup Day 2025: Take Another Moment to Consider Your Backup Strategy

Today is March 31st, so it’s World Backup Day once again. Not an official holiday, but certainly a necessary reminder.

Anyone without a good backup strategy today is playing with fire. Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, and legislation such as NIS2 is forcing organizations to get their data security in order.

Backups not only ensure that you can potentially recover files, but they also make you and your organization digitally resilient. “Cybersecurity begins with a well-thought-out backup strategy. On this World Backup Day, it’s important to protect your crucial data by applying the 3-2-1 principle: three copies, two types of storage media, and one off-site location.” states Ferdi van der Zwaag, Team Leader Benelux at Kingston Technology Europe Co LLP.

Clicking ‘save’ is no longer enough.

Data loss comes at a high price

From laptops breaking down to ransomware taking over an entire network: there are numerous ways to lose data. And the consequences are not minor. Companies lose not only files but also customer trust and, in the worst case: money. A lot of money.

Cybercrime has been increasing sharply lately. The European NIS2 directive, which has been in effect since October 2024, requires organizations to thoroughly secure their IT safety.

“As cybercrime reaches unprecedented levels, the implementation of the NIS2 directive represents a significant step forward in strengthening the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure within the EU,” says Van der Zwaag. “Organizations must take proactive measures to comply with NIS2 and protect sensitive data.”

In other words: backups are becoming ‘legally required’.

“Hardware-based encryption solutions offer a scalable and reliable way to comply with regulations and secure essential information, thus helping to navigate the complexity of today’s cybersecurity landscape.”

The basics: 3-2-1

The most well-known backup rule remains the 3-2-1 approach, which van der Zwaag also mentioned. The essence:

Three copies of your data: the original and two backups

Two different media: for example, an external SSD and a cloud solution

A backup at a different location, physical or virtual

This way, you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. If one medium fails or an entire server gets infected? You still have a copy.

For companies, this backup often happens via a cloud platform. For home users, it can also be an external drive that they keep at a different location.

Tools and Strategies for Every Target Group

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to backups, but these tips will help you set up a solid backup strategy.

To begin with, manual backups are unreliable. Everyone forgets to do it sometimes. Fortunately, there are tools today that do this automatically. Think of Time Machine (Mac) or more extensive software. It’s best to make these backups on an external hard drive or NAS. Such a solution offers quick access to your files. Cloud storage provides extra protection, and this combination is actually perfect today.

Additionally, hardware encryption is recommended, especially for sectors that need to comply with NIS2 or GDPR. This way, your data remains unreadable to others even in case of theft. Finally, a backup that you can’t restore is actually quite useless. Therefore, it’s important to regularly test whether your files can indeed be recovered.

What suits your needs?

For home users, a combination of an external drive and cloud storage like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or iCloud is often sufficient. Just make sure to enable automatic synchronization so that your backup always remains up-to-date.

For businesses, there are more comprehensive solutions. Think of backups of servers, complete virtual machines, or SaaS data. Professional IT teams opt for backups that cannot be overwritten, not even by ransomware.

Also important: know what to do in case of data loss. Who does what? How quickly should the data be available again? Without answers to these questions, your backup strategy is actually incomplete.