June Was Backup Awareness Month

The 4th annual Data Backup Study from Backblaze found that 94% of computer users risk losing precious data.

Personal photos, music, work documents, financial data and much more are at risk and not being backed up on a regular basis. While June’s Backup Awareness Month is over, it is not too late to ensure that your data is safe by backing it up. In previous surveys, the number of "at risk" people trends downward. However, this year the number of people not backing up their computer has increased. Worse yet, fewer people backed up "Daily or more", "Weekly or more", and "Monthly or more."

    Percent of Respondents Who Backup Computer Data

While the previous trend showed people increasingly backing up their computers, the number going down is interesting. Today, people have more data to protect; external hard drive prices continue to plummet enabling lower-cost local backups; and online backup services are booming. So, how is it possible that fewer users are backing up their data? The survey does not provide many answers.

One theory is people are purchasing more computers and not backing up all of them. A second theory is that people are entrusting their data more to the cloud. There are probably a lot of theories as to what may have caused this slight dip in people backing up their data. In any case, looking forward to the results of next year’s survey to see if the slight downturn is a trend or a one-year anomaly.

Backblaze provides an unlimited online backup service for $5 per month.

These surveys were conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive, Inc. on behalf of Backblaze June 28-30, 2011 among 2,257 respondents, June 3-7, 2010 among 2071 respondents, May 13-14, 2009 among 2,185 respondents, and May 27-29, 2008 among 2,761 respondents. In all surveys, respondents consisted of U.S. adult computer users (aged 18+), weighted to the U.S. adult population of computer users. No estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated; a full methodology is available.