In celebration of the WORLD BACKUP DAY, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has enjoined Nigerians to always back up their data regularly and ensure that their family, friends, and colleagues to do same.
World Backup Day (31st March each year) which originally began as World Backup Month was initiated by a hard drive company (Maxtor), which was later acquired by Seagate Technology.
Mrs Hadiza Umar, Head, Corporate Affairs and External Relations of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) said in a statement Tuesday night that this year’s event is timely because reminders of data protection are needed more than ever due to the sudden global shift to work-from-home.
“Furthermore, World Back-up Day aims to raise awareness concerning the role of data in our lives and consequently the importance of undertaking regular data backup.
“Data backup is the process of keeping a clean second copy of any important digital content to guarantee availability; even when a computer crashes, cell phones or tablets get lost, data becomes corrupted, or gets destroyed by a virus,” Umar said.
She said that with Nigeria’s drive for a vibrant Digital Economy, which intends to encourage both Public and Private Institutions to promote their services online, there is potential to generate a massive amount of data.
“Therefore, making a backup copy of your valuable data can make all the difference when data loss or a compromise occurs.
“NITDA encourages the public to safely store backup copies of all valuable data from servers, personal electronic devices such as computers, smartphones, and tablets regularly,” she stated.
NITDA, therefore, advised individuals and indeed the general public to back up data daily to an external storage device like Flash Drive, Memory Card, HardDisk Drive (HDD) or Solid State Drive (SSD), or Cloud Storage.
They should also follow the 3/2/1 backup rule with three copies of their data, two on different media types, and one remote copy (cloud storage).