It's 2010. I have a simple application that is business critical but doesn't see much traffic or load. I deploy it to a VM. I would like high availability so I also deploy it to another, passive VM and take advantage of clustering. In the year 2010 we call this redundancy and refer to the passive VM as a backup. But we also take snapshots of the VM at regular intervals (backups in the more literal sense) so we can stand it back up quickly in case of catastrophic failure (both servers go kaput). We don't even really need to have the second VM, because of how virtualization works, we do anyway because of service agreements to ensure 99.9% uptime instead of ~95% uptime.
It's 2026, marketing and corporate greed has changed what words mean. We have CI/CD now! It's amazing. We don't own or manage our own hardware anymore, megalithic corporations do that for us now for a small fee. They have ensured us they are resilient and can stand up new servers for us in the blink of an eye, again, for the right price. Everything is virtualized but we no longer actually take advantage of any of that shit. We have our pipelines deploying to even more always on environments for no fucking reason at all other than we've bought into the grift hook line and sinker. We even keep our disaster recovery environment up at all times now because... standards and best practices or some shit! I don't think we even take snapshots anymore, or at least our cloud provider maybe does? Who knows? One thing is for sure, none of these supposedly identical environments are considered backups, because fuck the English language if it gets in the way of profits.
I don't think you and I are disagreeing on the what, more the how and the why. A lot of times the purpose of a particular type of technology gets lost in the weeds or suppressed because of money.
A VM should be portable, nobody actually uses that portability anymore. Not really.
You can still buy a landline and a pager but no one does that any more because it sucks. You can still buy physical servers and host them yourself but no one does that any more either because it sucks: Maintaining and hosting physical hardware sucks, as much as I love it, because while you are eating cooling and power costs, you get no benefits from that physical ownership. No one is in business to own servers: They are there to sell phones/phone service, oil, cars, cat food, pictures of cats, whatever. It's far cheaper to let specialists do it at scale.
And people do migrate all the time, and its a hell of a lot easier than a DC consolidation move, let me tell you. I have done several and holy shit, that is some of the hardest work I have ever done. I would take a week of two a days over couple of the DC moves. VM migrations are, in fact, easy: You copy data, build VMs, move and test custom code if need be. Give yourself enough lead time and voila, You are migrated. Not nearly that easy but better than having a tractor-trailer show up with a bunch of 1- to 5U servers over multiple days, fibre runs, environmentals, the whole 9 yards.
No one called a passive VM in an active HA pair in 2010 a backup anywhere unless they were just, I don't know: untrained? self-taught? speaking colloquially? The concept is so alien now its hard to remember. In my personal life I have all kinds of backup things. That's just not how the term is used in the IT context because you specifically make a thing called "backups" You don't call something else a backup to prevent confusion, for which you seem wax nostalgic. It was ITIL V3 in 2010. I mean, I guess to someone off the street everything's a rock but to a geologist, that simply isn't true.
This isn't productive since you aren't going to move off your hard-fought position for whatever reason. No one is robbing you of the past. Nothing has changed. Backup is the same term it has always in Corporate IT. IT Professionals never used the term in the way you think but regular people use it that way all the time I guess. "Code-switching" I think the kids call it.
