U.S. Daily Backups Rise 47% in Past Year

Backblaze, Inc., an online backup provider, revealed that PC and Mac users are getting serious about backing up their computers.

The 5th annual Backblaze State of User Data Backup survey determined that 10% of computer users now backup their computers at least daily. This is a 47% increase over 2011. The survey recorded similar improvements for weekly backups and monthly backups as well with increases of 38% and 29% respectively.

"These are the best results we’ve seen since we started tracking data backup 5 years ago," stated Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO at Backblaze. "Our goal in starting Backblaze was to ensure no one lost data again. It’s great to see that the desire to protect photos, videos, music, and other data is becoming an every day part of using a computer. There is no reason to lose data to a hard drive crash or a stolen or lost computer when you have affordable, easy to use online backup services like Backblaze available."

In each of the last five years, Backblaze has commissioned Harris Interactive, Inc. to conduct their annual data backup survey.

Below summarizes the results when computer users were asked:
"How often do you backup all of the data on your computer?"

	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012
Daily or more	6%	6%	8%	6%	10%
Weekly or more	2%	14%	16%	14%	20%
Monthly or more	26%	27%	30%	27%	36%

The survey also reported that 29% of U.S. computer users have never backed up all their data with adults ages 55 and older being most remiss (35%) and the 18-34 age group being the most diligent (24%).

Backblaze makes data backup easy by continuously and automatically backing up PC or Mac. Then, when the computer crashes, is stolen or lost, or files or folders are accidentally deleted, you can recover your files. The service backups an unlimited amount of data for $5 per month or $50 a year per computer.

Survey Methodology
The surveys were conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Backblaze as follows: May 31-June 4, 2012 among 2,209 respondents, June 28-30, 2011 among 2,257 respondents, June 3-7, 2010 among 2,071 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