World Backup Day 2026

It might seem unusual to keep dedicating time to topics like data protection – especially backups – but it remains essential. As data volumes continue to grow rapidly, many individuals and organizations still underestimate the level of risk and exposure they face.

At the most basic level, protection begins with duplication – what we can call redundancy. You should never rely on a single instance of your data. However, redundancy can take many forms depending on specific requirements, use cases, and organizational needs. Common concepts include copies, clones, snapshots, backups, versioning, replication, continuous data protection, mirroring, and RAID. Additional techniques such as deduplication and compression help reduce storage usage, while encryption and ransomware detection enhance security. Storage targets what we called secondary storage may include disk, tape, or cloud, along with in general, open formats, portable systems, air-gapped environments, SaaS solutions, or open-source tools.

It’s important to note that some of these approaches can be combined, and not all of them qualify as true backups. For example, RAID and mirroring provide redundancy but are not substitutes for proper backup strategies.

When choosing a data protection method, one key criterion is how quickly and effectively you can recover your data. Look for solutions that allow browsing, searching, and querying of backups, as recovery is often needed urgently. Ultimately, a backup is only valuable if it enables you to restore the right data, quickly, when it matters most.

A dedicated website exists to participate to the awareness about data protection.

• Renaud Bonnevie, CPO, Atempo
  World Backup Day is no longer just about backup, it’s about future-proof data resilience. As cyber threats intensify and quantum risks emerge, organizations must ensure long-term data integrity, confidentiality, and rapid recoverability. Atempo is advancing post-quantum encryption to help enterprises protect data today and keep it secure for decades to come.
• Yev Pusin, Head of Communications, Backblaze
  Just in time for World Backup Day, Backblaze today announced that one of its original Storage Pod 1.0 chassis will be preserved in the Computer History Museum’s permanent collection. This recognition of Storage Pod 1.0 cements Backblaze’s place in the annals of computer history. We’re proud to see it preserved by the Computer History Museum for future generations.
• Ken Barth, CEO, Catalogic Software
  World Backup Day is a timely reminder this year. The infrastructure we rely on: cloud platforms, data centers, networks, can be disrupted in ways that are hard to predict and impossible to ignore. Backup is table stakes. What actually matters is recoverability – knowing that when something goes wrong, you can get back up. At Catalogic, that’s the design principle behind everything we build.
• Fraser Hutchison, VP UK&I, Cohesity
  World Backup Day highlights backup’s role, but backup alone isn’t enough. True cyber resilience requires immutable backups, threat detection, and secure recovery. Many organizations still take a fragmented approach using multiple platforms. The goal isn’t just restoring data quickly, but safely, free from compromise. Organizations embedding backup as part of a structured cyber maturity strategy are far better positioned to withstand attacks and recover with confidence.
• Oded Nagel, CEO, CTERA
  Modern data protection, built on principles of immutability and guaranteed recovery, is not just a feature but is a fundamental component of business continuity itself. It is the ultimate digital insurance policy, not just for your files, but for your entire enterprise. On World Backup Day, my message to fellow leaders is simple: Don’t just ask your teams if they are backing up. Ask them how they are guaranteeing the swift, complete restoration of your business.
• Carl D’Halluin, CTO, Datadobi
  This World Backup Day is a timely reminder that data protection goes beyond backups. First, maintain a ‘golden copy’ of your data – an immutable, secure backup that guards against loss, corruption, and threats. Second, know your data. Across today’s organizations, data sprawls across silos, and you can’t protect what you don’t know exists. Third, and increasingly critical, know who can access it. Excessive or outdated permissions are a silent risk hiding in plain sight.
• Bill Andrews, CEO, ExaGrid
  World Backup Day highlights the need to rethink data protection as demands evolve. Backup is now strategic, balancing performance, scalability, security, disaster recovery, and costs. Top priorities are fast backup ingest, quick restores, and ransomware protection. Older approaches like primary storage or early deduplication systems are no longer sufficient—next-gen solutions are needed.
• David Cerf, Chief Data Evangelist, Grau Data
  Backup is evolving from storage capacity to recovery intelligence. Organizations can no longer rely on copies alone – they must understand what data they have, where it lives, and how to recover it efficiently. Durable archives remain essential, but visibility into content and context is what makes recovery practical at scale.
• Simon Taylor, founder and CEO, HYCU
  As we all know, AI is accelerating not just how fast we create and use data, it’s also accelerating how fast we can lose it. Most organizations still don’t control their data. It lives in SaaS apps they don’t protect, in regions they don’t choose, under policies they don’t own. On World Backup Day, the real question isn’t if your data is backed up. It’s whether you actually control it. That’s why we built HYCU R-Cloud the way we did. To give IT teams something they’ve been missing for years.
• Chris Groot, General Manager, N-able
  World Backup Day reminder: Backups are promises. Recovery testing is proof. Add resilience and security, and you get certainty. Don’t wait for ransomware or a bad day to test your plan. Test it. Trust it. Sleep better.
• Thomas Thalmann, CEO, PoINT Software & Systems
  Backup for object storage is often overlooked, but it is essential. While modern object storage systems offer redundancy, they are not immune to data loss. Although erasure coding protects against hardware failures, it cannot prevent human error, malicious ransomware, or software bugs that can immediately corrupt or delete data. Integrating an S3-to-Tape backup software provides the necessary security and delivers the benefits of tape technology.
• Ted Oade, Director, Product Marketing, Spectra Logic
  World Backup Day was originally inspired by an unfortunate data loss incident and is often framed as a reminder to back up data in case of accidental loss, hardware failures, human error, or cyberattacks. Today, as we recognize the day, the importance of preserving data is expanding beyond recovery to encompass long-term value. The datasets organizations protect today will shape the insights, innovations, and decisions of tomorrow making their integrity and longevity a strategic imperative.
• Gal Naor, CEO, StorONE
  On World Backup Day last year, I said that all-flash backup architectures were an expensive and unnecessary investment for most organizations. That perspective was not based on market timing, it was based on a fundamental principle, not all data has the same value, and it should not be treated as if it does. On this World Backup Day, the question is no longer how fast your backups are, it is whether your architecture reflects how data is actually used.
• Boyan Ivanov, CEO, StorPool Storage
  A common and painful customer question recently has been backup for non-VMware environments, especially Linux/KVM. While not fully solved, several vendors offer solid solutions. StorPool provides two proven options: VolumeCare (backup) and StorPool DRE (Disaster Recovery Engine) for DR & business continuity.
• Paweł Mączka, CEO, Storware
  World Backup Day is a reminder that data doesn’t protect itself – and good intentions don’t restore servers. At Storware, every day is Backup Day. We’ve been building that discipline into enterprise infrastructure since 2015, across hypervisors most vendors pretend don’t exist. One day a year to think about backup is a start. 364 days of not thinking about it – because it just works – is the goal.
• Matt Swalley, Senior Director, Marketing, Vdura
  World Backup Day reminds us that data protection has changed. AI and HPC generate data faster than legacy backups can handle. The question isn’t just ‘do you have a backup?’ but ‘can your storage protect data at the speed it’s created?’ AI pipelines need storage with the velocity to feed GPUs and the durability to avoid single points of failure. Resilience and performance must now be one.
• Dr Phil Storey, CEO, XenData
  As a company specializing in long-term archive solutions, our customers require strong data protection. This can be achieved in multiple ways based on the following themes: replicating in at least two locations, storing on two different media types and providing ransomware protection. The later can be achieved by keeping an immutable copy or by introducing an airgap. Many of our customers achieve peace of mind by archiving to both cloud and on-prem LTO configured to retain an immutable copy.