World Backup Day
By Ria Sharma

US-based Reddit.com, like Digg, is a site where anyone on the internet can provide content.  And the Reddit community votes to decide what is good and what is garbage.  The more votes a submitted article / link gets, the more chances it will make its way to the front page and consequently international exposure and attention. Reddit is hugely popular in India and Pakistan.

Reddit is part of the powerful Conde Nast publishing group which owns highly regarded technology and business sites like Wired and Ars Technica. 

According to Alexa figures for Jan, 2011, Reddit gets most of its traffic from USA (43.9 %), India (12.9 %), United Kingdom (5.2 %), Canada (4.6%) and Pakistan (3.3 %).

In early 2011, Reddit announced that it has hit an all time high of a billion pageviews in a single month

A team of volunteers from Reddit have set up the World Backup Day on March 31 (USA time) which spills on to April 1 in India (time zone differences)

This independent, non-profit initiative by Redditors urges everyone to ‘backup your memories and financial information and check your old backup restores’

A long time colleague and friend lost all photos and documents last week when her laptop was stolen.  A good backup would have saved her many of the tears of frustration.

As the World Backup Day explains: “When a hard drive fails, if the data isn't backed up, it's gone. And it's not a question of if your hard drive will fail, it's when. Many people visualize their computer as a single thing with a big part (like a toaster) when in fact it has a number of different components (like a car). Those components are: the motherboard, the processor (or CPU), the memory (or RAM), the power supply, the optical drives and the hard drive. The hard drive is the part of the computer where all your data is kept. The hard drive is the component that has the highest likelihood of breaking unexpectedly, and it is the component that causes the most damage when it fails! If the processor fails, a new one can be switched out and the computer will be exactly the same as when you started. On the other hand, if the hard drive breaks, the data will most likely be unrecoverable, unless you're willing to spend an exorbitant amount of money on data recovery.
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