Corporations have steadily moved critical applications and data from the mainframe to servers, and now to desktop and mobile PCs. In fact, in a recent IDC report, more than 300 million business PCs have a combined 109,000 terabytes of data that is not backed up regularly and, “as much as 60% of corporate data resides unprotected on PC desktops and laptops.” Source: IDC analyst Cynthia Doyle
* Over “34% of companies do not test their backups” and of those that tested, “77% found their tape backups failed to restore.” – Storage Magazine
* Scheduled online backup agents consistently fail after they have over-congested an Internet connection and caused problems with other network services. Solo Technology
* Major consumer online backup providers loose customer’s data and fail to provide reliable support. TechCrunch
* The vast majority of online backup providers do not offer Continuous Data Protection and cannot restore a file with your most recent changes – SonicWALL
* You have a “62% chance of data loss due to an uncorrectable read error” with one failed RAID disk. zdnet – Storage Bits
* An estimated “60% of companies that lose their data shut down within 6 months.” – John Jackson, Storage Insider
Of those companies participating in the 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey:
• 46% said each hour of downtime would cost their companies up to $50k
• 28% said each hour would cost between $51K and $250K
• 18% said each hour would cost between $251K and $1 million
• 8% said it would cost their companies more than $1 million per hour
Source: 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results
Miscellaneous stats about computer data loss:
• A hard drive crashes every 15 seconds
• 2,000 laptops are stolen or lost every day
• 32% of data loss is caused by human error
• 31% of PC users have lost all of their PC files to events beyond their control
• 25% of lost data is due to the failure of a portable drive
• 44% of data loss caused by mechanical failures
• 15% or more of laptops are stolen or suffer hard drive failures
• 1 in 5 computers suffer a fatal hard drive crash during their lifetime
• Overall average failure rate of disk and tape drives is 100% – all drives eventually fail
Stats about business backup practices:
• 40% of Small and Medium Sized Businesses don’t back up their data at all
• 60% of all data is held on PC Desktops and laptops
• 40 – 50% of all backups are not fully recoverable and up to 60% of all backups fail in general
• One-third of all computers sold are notebooks
• Mobile workers in North America have represented the majority of the workforce since 2003
Stats about the cost of recouping data:
• It takes 19 days and costs $17,000 to retype 20 megabytes of sales data
• The same volume of accounting data takes 21 days and costs $19,000
• Recreating data from scratch is estimated to cost between $2000 and $8000 per MB
• Insurance of business data is expensive, and in certain countries, insurance companies will not insure data
• 60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months of the disaster
• 72% of businesses that suffer major data loss disappear within 24 months
A national Harris Interactive survey of 597 computer users reveals:
• Nearly three out of five personal computer users have lost an electronic file they thought they had sufficiently stored
• One in four users frequently back up digital files, even when 85 percent of computer users say they are very concerned about losing important digital data
• 82 percent keep a hard copy of important documents they’ve also saved electronically
• Thirty-seven percent of the survey’s respondents admitted to backing up their files less than once per month
• Nine percent admitted they have never backed up their files
• More than 22 percent said backing up information is on their to-do list, but they seldom do it
Among home computer users who backup information:
• 68 percent save the things most important to them in multiple places, the hard drive as well as removable media such as floppy disks (79 percent) compact disks (CDs, 58 percent)
