By Angeline Mgbele, Correspondent Abuja

The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) joins the public in celebrating World Backup Day. World Backup Day (March 31 each year) originally began as World Backup Month. The event was initiated by a hard drive company (Maxtor), which was later acquired by Seagate Technology.

According to a statement by NITDA’s Head, Corporate Affairs and External Relations, Hadiza Umar, 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.

The statement reads in part: “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.”

NITDA advises the public to adopt the following  for data backup:

* Individuals can 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.

* Follow the 3/2/1 backup rule with three copies of your data, two on different media types, and one remote copy (cloud storage).

* Be sure to backup your data regularly and encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to do the same.