Around six years ago on a Wednesday morning, software professionals worldwide were startled by a tweet from GitLab stating that they had accidentally deleted their production data, causing their site to go offline. Unfortunately, at that point in time, the open-source code repository giant had no idea that it would take them another 36 hours to restore their systems only to learn that 5,000 projects and 700 new user accounts were affected while they were fixing the outage.

It’s World Backup Day! And that means that once again, backup vendors, influencers, and pundits are talking about the importance of backing up your data. Of course, that’s important, as is testing your backups on a regular basis, and making sure you’re adhering to regulatory and security standards in the process. But in the 12 years since World Backup Day began, surely we’ve learned some lessons about how to do backup better?

In today’s data-driven economy, data is the lifeblood of any business. A catastrophic data loss event can cause irreversible damage to an organization’s reputation, financial stability, and business continuity. This #WorldBackupDay, we’re reminding organizations worldwide of the importance of backing up their data and having a robust recovery plan in place through our campaign #AlwaysHaveAPlanB. In terms of data recovery, having a plan B means simply having a backup plan.

Data loss is catastrophic for any business. TrueList’s data loss statistics point out that “almost 70% of small businesses close within a year of a large data loss.” One of the most effective ways to prevent loss is to backup data. There are multiple data backup solutions available, and one of the newest options is known as chain-free backup.

When thinking about your strategy around backups, recovery, availability, and business continuity, one part of the plan tends to fall by the wayside: backup retention. We focus so much on things like recovery objectives, SLAs, and tiers of data, that our thinking revolves around the need to potentially recover the backup that we just made a matter of minutes afterward. But there are data sets that need to be available weeks, months—even years—after they are made.

While data disasters are inevitable, having a planned backup strategy can mitigate its damaging effects. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, businesses and organizations should observe the 3-2-1 backup strategy for assured data safety. Superficially, the 3-2-1 backup rule is a backup strategy that increases and diversifies the number of backups used.