Zhang wrote a note and put up flyers about the theft, which was picked up by ABC News and which a friend of his posted to his Facebook page, and which was then posted to Reddit and many other websites beyond that. He offered $1000 to the thieves for the data, telling them exactly where on the disk they could find it, giving them the password, and telling them they could keep the computer already; he just wanted to graduate.

Now, in honor of the “Everything Wrong With … in X Minutes” CinemaSins YouTube movie spoofs (and they’re hysterical), here’s everything wrong with this story.

1. “Zhang’s laptop had been in an unlocked room in Wright-Rieman, which houses laboratories.” People can walk into Rutgers University lab rooms and walk out with laptops? Doesn’t campus security worry about thieves stealing other equipment, student records, dangerous chemicals, and so on?
2. “Rutgers is an open campus,” said [Rutgers Police Lt. Paul ] Fischer. “It’s not like a small liberal arts college where it’s gated in. So, even if the buildings are secured, people can piggyback in.” This is the reaction of the security guy, whose job it supposedly is to keep the campus secure? Oh well, people can walk in and take things?
3. Campus security doesn’t have security cameras, even in laboratories where people are working with chemicals and on laptops?
4. Does Rutgers really want their security guy on national television telling everyone how easy it is to steal things from the campus?
5. Just how many things get stolen from Rutgers, anyway?
6. If it’s so easy to steal things from Rutgers, wouldn’t it be a good idea for the campus police to tell this to the students, before students lose five years of research?
7. “Fischer said that he wouldn’t suggest offering monetary rewards in the future” because it can invite fraud. Okay. What should the student have done differently (other than your barn-door suggestion that he hang on to his laptop next time)? Can’t he get the student to withdraw the reward if it’s such a bad idea?
8. Is the Rutgers security guy working with this student to ensure he doesn’t agree to meet someone, get bopped on the head, and also be out $1000? Or to otherwise protect him from fraud?
9. Does the Rutgers security guy think that having the theft nationally publicized on ABC News is a smart move? And on Facebook? And on Reddit?
10. Shouldn’t the Rutgers security guy suggest to Facebook that maybe it would be a good idea to redact the student’s personal information from the posting, which has more than 33,000 shares?
11. Is the Rutgers security guy maybe checking Craigslist? And eBay?
12. Doesn’t the chemistry department have a server to which students can save their data? Hell, I went to Boise State and we had that.
13. If it’s this easy to steal things from campus, and there’s no provision for students to back up their data on campus, and nobody warns students their work is that vulnerable, and the student may have to start his research over, doesn’t he have the basis of a nice lawsuit?
14. Just what sort of chemical research is this student doing, anyway? Do we need to worry about a new kind of poison gas or IED springing up in New Jersey?
15. How competitive is the chemistry research program at Rutgers? Is it possible the thief is someone in his department who’s fighting with him for grants or something?
16. What are the chances that the student isn’t actually ready for his thesis defense and this is his way of procrastinating until the laptop is “found”?
17. This student’s been going to Rutgers for five years and he didn’t know the buildings are insecure?
18. “…from where his computer was taken sometime between 10 a.m. and 5:15 p.m.” This student leaves his laptop unattended in an unlocked room from 10 am to 5:15 pm and is surprised that it’s gone? Are we sure that Lost & Found didn’t pick it up?
19. We’ve got a student smart enough to be getting a PhD in chemistry but not smart enough to keep from leaving his laptop in an unlocked room?
20. Or to copy his data to a DVD?
21. To a thumb drive?
22. To a cloud storage service?
23. To an external hard disk?
24. To email it to himself?
25. To do a backup? “’A lot of people are asking me why I didn’t back up my data,” Jim told the Daily Dot. ”I think the reason is that I am pretty busy recently and this kind of thing never happened to me before.’”
26. “The posters contained very specific instructions and details regarding his dilemma, including his laptop’s password.” Well, that certainly makes it easier for the thieves to use the laptop.
27. Where is the student getting the $1000, anyway? And how did he come up with that figure?
28. The posts also included his phone number. If the thieves even wanted to call, would they be able to make it through the blizzard of harassing phone calls he must be getting by now?
29. He has also suffered several scamming attempts. “’There are a few people sending me messages saying they have my laptop and asking for money, but when I asked for proof, they cannot give anything to me,’ he said.” You think?
30. Really, should this student even be allowed to be messing with chemicals in the first place?
31. Does the student think that the thief is stupid enough to show up to a meeting to exchange the data and money?
32. Or to pick it up at a mailbox?
33. How exactly does the student think this is going to work? The thief will send him the data and trust him to send the money? He’ll send the money and trust the thief to send him the data? The thief will hand him the data and hang around while he checks it?
34. Even if he gets the data back, how is he going to know that the thief didn’t change some of the data just to mess with him?
35. How many backup companies are offering to pay all the student’s expenses in return for his doing an ad for them?

Now in its third year, the event — deliberately scheduled for the day before April Fool’s Day, to ensure your data is backed up in the case of a prank gone awry — is intended to encourage people to make sure their data is backed up, much like the days that daylight saving time starts and ends get piggybacked by Change the Batteries in Your Smoke Detector Day.

Last year, I didn’t find out til afterwards, but this year, I found out in plenty of time to celebrate it properly.

As of Thursday, almost 4500 people had pledged to observe the day, which not only includes making backups of your own data and checking your restores, but also alerting your friends and family.

Vendors such as Carbonite and Kroll also released surveys associated with backups. The Carbonite study found that 30% of small businesses believe their backup plan is insufficient, 45% said their organization had experienced data loss, and 14% were never able to restore their lost business information.

Small businesses often lack a formal disaster recovery plan is because they do not have the budget, the survey showed, but there’s an average cost of about $9,000 for a small business to recover their data after a failure, Carbonite said.

Surveying its own users, Kroll Data Recovery found that of the 81% who do have backups now, 53% use an external hard drive, while 15% used tape and 15% used online or cloud backup services. And while 60% of its customers did have a backup running at the time of the data loss, it wasn’t current or was operating incorrectly, Kroll warned.

World Backup Day now also has posters and t-shirts, as well as a Tumblr. In addition, the event asks people to take pictures of themselves celebrating. “Be sure to take pictures or videos of you promoting World Backup Day!” reads the website. “Just send them to hello@worldbackupday.com, tweet us @WorldBackupDay, or submit them to our Tumblr!” There’s also a Facebook page, an Instagram feed, and a Pinterest page.

In addition, there’s a full press kit, which includes an infographic.

All kidding aside, it’s not a bad time to re-examine your backup strategy; a number of vendors actually do have World Backup Day Sales.

There’s even a contest.

And as a bonus, this year’s World Backup Day is also followed the next day by my favorite holiday, Cheap Chocolate Day, though you can’t always count on that happening, plus some people hold out for the traditional February 15 for that one.

Just kidding. Actually, it was last Saturday, and I didn’t even hear about it til a day or so afterwards. It was, in fact, only the second time the holiday had been celebrated.

As it happens, World Backup Day came into being from a reddit discussion a year ago.

I just think it would be for the good of everyone to have a reminder to save all your cherished pictures, videos and other important data to somewhere secure.

Companies should also get involved, making sure that their customers and their own data is secure and safe. Maybe even the back-up providers could offer discounts and rates based on the date to encourage sales and participation.

Why March 31? The theory was to have your computer all backed up in case there were tricks or viruses associated with April Fool’s Day. There’s now a web page and a Facebook page, as well as a Twitter feed that seems to look for people mentioning hard drive failures and then asks brightly whether they’d remembered to do a backup first — safe out of punching range.

Not surprisingly, backup vendors have jumped on the notion of World Backup Day, with — just as the original poster suggested — discounts and suchlike to encourage people to back up their data, as well as several helpful infographics and even Pinterest sites talking about the scourge of data loss. The holiday is also starting to make it to the mainstream media, and user organizations such as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory picked it up as well.

All kidding aside, it’s not a bad mnemonic idea, on the order of changing the batteries in your smoke detector during the switches to and from Daylight Savings Time. (By the way, when do people in Indiana and Arizona change their smoke alarm batteries, if those states don’t observe Daylight Savings Time?) Anything that encourages consumers to do backups is probably a good thing, though an annual backup probably isn’t that much help.

Unlike some holidays such as National Telework Week, which asks people to pledge to work at home and then calculates the hours they worked and the savings they made, World Backup Day doesn’t do any followup, so we don’t actually know how many people observed World Backup Day and from how many data losses we were saved. Perhaps that’s an idea for World Backup Day #3.