In the late 1990s, W. Curtis Preston wrote a book called “Unix Backup and Recovery”. A later version was just named “Backup and Recovery”. Both were published by O’Reilly.
He was saying similar things at that time (e.g., “Backups are worthless, Restores are priceless”), and I’m certain he wasn’t the first.
But you’d have to ask him who was saying things like that before he did.
Disclaimer: Curtis was a co-worker of mine at the time, and I was a technical reviewer of the book in question.
The article slightly annoyed me by saying, “Why one does backups? To have a copy of data at hand if something goes wrong.” Not, I think, the best way to put it, per your comment.