Humans share information about their current situations as well as their pasts. Even before the advent of writing, we shared knowledge in stories passed down between generations.
For over ten thousand years we have been using writing to keep records and preserve literature, beginning with stone or clay tablets.
Paper and ink made this process easier, but paper is less resilient than stone or clay. As paper became more readily available, individuals began to make copies of everything and kept those copies in a different place to increase resilience. A backup!
Today we have at least 13 copies of the Magna Carta, written in 1215 and replicated for distribution. Copying the document created an immutable backup stored in more than one location. This prevented denial of its existence and contents.
Humans writing on paper to record information continued into the twentieth century. The process of creating extra copies in real time improved with the addition of carbon paper and this transferred to the age of typewriters. Organizations could more easily know what happened yesterday, last week, last month, even last year.
We have been creating backups for as long as we have used paper, possibly longer. What’s changed is the medium we use. The digital age has streamlined content creation and information storage.
When I started my IT career, 1.44MB floppy disks were everywhere, and everyone made sure to copy what needed to be kept. Before that, computers used punch cards. We progressed as tape reels for data storage replaced them.
Backup to tape for the SMB/E market took off at the same time as personal computers and departmental file servers. Centralized storage required a more coherent approach to backup.
Computers caught the first virus in 1971, and the first ransomware attack occurred in 1989. By that time the PC movement was in full swing and the concept of disaster recovery was fully formed. The reasons for backing up our data increased.
We back up not only to mitigate the risk of malware or ransomware causing data loss, but also to protect against accidental deletion or storage failure. There are organizations that see backup as an unnecessary burden, until data is lost.
The cost of backup should be weighed against the cost of re-creating the work that was lost, as well as the potential for regulatory penalties and reputational damage.
The digital age has seen its fair share of change. Online backup began more than twenty years ago, and it was not called cloud backup because the term "cloud," which describes servers hosted in the data centers accessed over the internet, had yet to be coined.
Use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup hosted in the cloud is as common now as copying your files to a USB stick once was.
We have come a long way from scribes making copies of important documents to backing up our home finance spreadsheets to a cloud service. The need to share and store information is as old as humanity. The amount of information we want to keep has grown as the world population has increased and as technology has improved and become more available. Just think of the number of photograph and video posts shared and liked every day, and the larger number of them that are kept and never shared.
The mechanisms we use to back up have become more complicated to deliver and manage, yet easier to employ. But many still see backup as an optional extra. The harsh reality has always been that if you do not have another copy of your data kept in a different location, you risk losing something important, valuable, unique, and potentially irreplaceable!
As cyber threats and data-loss risks increase, businesses must prioritize reliable, multi-location backups to ensure resilience and continuity.
