It’s no coincidence that World Backup Day – March 31 – falls right before April Fool’s Day. Losing data is no joke. And it can really make you feel foolish. So, before you lose data, back it up. You’ll be glad you did.

World Backup Day was organized by a concerned group of internet users who dared to ask the question, “What would happen if you lost everything?” If you think it could never happen, then you’re exactly the type of person World Backup Day was created for. We’re here to tell you: it can, it does, and it will.

At Carbonite HQ, we keep track of the number of customers we’ve saved from ransomware. The count is over 13,000 as of this writing. And that’s just from one form of data loss. There are many more. The most common is human error.

There’s one thing everyone who has experienced ransomware and other forms of data loss have in common. And that’s the relief they feel when they get their data back. There’s nothing like it. And that’s what we acknowledge on World Backup Day.

Every holiday has its own unique spirit. Just like Christmas is a time of giving and Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful, World Backup Day is about the relief you feel when you recover precious data that you thought might be lost. Whether it’s personal data like family photos or business data like transaction history, the sense of relief is the same. On World Backup Day, we recognize it, but it doesn’t stop there.

World Backup Day is also a reminder to follow best practices for backing up. One of the most popular frameworks for backup best practices is the 3-2-1 Backup Rule. In short, it says you should keep three copies of your data in two different form factors with at least one at an offsite location such as the cloud.

Those are all good recommendations and we endorse them 100 percent. But there’s one big thing that the 3-2-1 Backup Rule doesn’t cover and it’s just as important as the other rules. Backup has to be automatic.

A lot of people improvise when it comes to backing up. They get into a habit of backing up every month or every year or whenever they get around to it. Relying on backup as a personal habit is risky because it fails to address human error (it bears repeating, the most common cause of data loss). This is why a true backup solution has to include the automation of backups.

Don’t let World Backup Day go by without making the most of it. Evaluate your backup strategy. What’s your backup frequency? Can you tolerate the potential data loss that exists between backups? Should you be backing up more frequently? Are you keeping one copy locally and another offsite? Finally, have you tested recovering a file? If not, maybe it’s time you should.