Data Backup Digest

A poll conducted by backup company Acronis, released in the lead up to World Backup Day on the 31st of March, has found that consumers are becoming more aware of the need to backup all of their data. But although people may be putting value on their data, are they actually going through with the most important step: the backup process.

World Backup Day is an annual event that aims to educate and motivate the public on the important of having a stable and secure backup plan in order to protect their digital life.

The survey from Acronis was conducted with more than 350 consumers. It found that 75% of respondents are storing their data digitally, moving away from paper document storage. This includes, but isn’t limited to, financial and health documents, photos, music and work files.

Despite this shift of digital reliance, with hugely important bits of data now being stored digitally and consumers seeing the importance in the data, the same level of effort isn’t being put into backup and ensuring that data is safe if a disaster strikes.

Less than half of the respondents don’t save their data to an external device or to the cloud, which means that just over half of respondents store their data only on their computer (or not at all). Of those actually using a data backup system, only a third are actually protecting their entire computer system. The rest are only protecting some files, which is an unadvisable move – it relies on human judgement of what’s important and to manually update that list of backed up files each time something new is added.

Nearly half of the respondents valued their data at over $1,000 and it’s not hard to see why. That data could be important financial documents or business plans; alternatively, it could be precious family photos or messages from loved ones. In some ways, the data we store on our computers and portable devices is priceless because it’s personal to us and cannot be replicated.

Acronis said that a complete backup protection system costs less than $100, with 93 percent of respondents saying that they would be willing to pay this in order to have their data backed up. However, only a surprising 5% of respondents said that they would be willing to pay the same amount in order to recover their data following a disaster.

“The majority of consumers do not realise the importance of backing up their digital memories, including everything from precious photos to financial information, until a catastrophe occurs,” said Serguei Beloussov, the chief executive officer at Acronis. “What consumers should understand is that there are easy and inexpensive ways to safeguard the digital data that they’re most afraid of losing.”

Although backup may be seen as an important thing to do in consumer’s eyes, not enough of them are actually doing it. And when many are willing to pay less than $100 to actually backup that data, there’s no excuse to not put up that safeguard.