March 31 is World Backup Day; do you know where your data is?
If you're among the majority of Australian companies, the answer is probably 'no'. A Kroll Ontrack survey suggests that only half of Australians have a backup solution in place, but this rate is significantly behind the 65 percent of the 642 survey respondents using backup solutions across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
External hard drives were the favoured mechanism for backup, used by some 61 percent of respondents, while cloud backup was used by 14 percent of Australian respondents.
Interestingly, 64 percent of Australians said they diligently backed up their data on a daily basis – compared with just 55 percent across all geographies.
Despite the widespread use of backup solutions, however, the survey suggests that many companies are still losing their data: fully 64 percent claimed they had lost business data and 36 percent had lost personal data.
Asked why they had not implemented a backup solution, 49 percent said it took too much time to research and administer a backup solution. Expense, named by 27 percent of respondents, was the next most common barrier to proper backup.
Even where backup was in place, respondents named a range of reasons why it had not functioned as expected. These included backup that was performed on demand rather than being run automatically; the computer being off during a scheduled backup; a backup software failure; a destination drive that didn't have enough space for the backup; a file being lost before a scheduled backup occurred; or relying on a backup profile that didn't cover every device that required backup.
“With backup technology getting better in quality and price, it is no surprise we saw an uptick in the percentage of people implementing a backup solution,” said Abhik Mitra, data recovery manager with Kroll Ontrack, in a statement.
“What is interesting is that those that spend time, effort and money to implement the solution still experienced data loss, proving that one needs to be extremely diligent to ensure their chosen backup method is successful.”