Why backup your computer files online?

When I sat down to write this article, I had approximately 166 gigabytes of music, 365 gigabytes of pictures and home video, 386 gigabyte of various software and personal documents, as well as 441 gigabytes of random videos, movies and TV shows on my main computer’s internal hard drives. Just in case “1,358 gigabytes” means absolutely nothing to you- my computer has over 45,000 folders that contain a total of about 650,000 personal computer files.

Please understand that I am not attempting to brag; a lot of real computer geeks store way more data than I do – I’m just a poser geek. My point was to let everyone know that (a) I’m a pack-rat, but more importantly (b) I would have no idea what to do with myself if I lost any of my digital data. All of the pictures and personal videos that I have taken since 2004 are digital. I can’t imagine losing all of those memories because of a stupid accident or hard drive crash.

Even worse than your hardware crapping out on you, is being victim to a natural disaster that not only destroys your computer but everything else that you own. California has had a horrible fire season this year and hundreds of people suddenly found themselves without a home. A lot of us use our computers to store not only personal images but also some of our music, emails, financial records, contact information, or other important documents. If I had just lost everything – I’m sure that I would feel a tiny bit better knowing that I could retrieve those important files and documents from my secure online backup.

It’s not just a California problem and it’s not just about fires. Pretty much any natural disaster has the power to destroy your computer. Luckily only about 7% of data loss situations are caused by some type of disaster. However, if you keep reading you will realize that there are all types of gremlins trying to ruin your files.

Average People and Data Loss

There is a very high chance that the average person will lose some or all of their digital data at one point or another. There are statistics floating around out there which claim that 32% of lost data is due to human error. Not only do we accidentally delete things, but approximately three out of five computer users have lost a file (or more) that they could have sworn was saved to the right place. However, being stupid isn’t the only thing that we need to worry about because every 15 seconds there is a hard drive out there in the world that crashes (or fails.) I’ll go ahead and note that a simple drive recovery can cost hundreds of dollars and is not guaranteed to be successful. While you’re worrying about all that; there are approximately 2,000 laptops stolen or lost every day and about 97% of stolen laptops or desktops are never recovered.

Let’s not forget about computer viruses which can corrupt or destroy your data very quickly. Around 40% of computer users have been infected by a virus which is a low percentage considering that 75% of us either (a) don’t use any anti-virus software, or (b) don’t update their existing anti-virus program on a regular basis.

Businesses and Data Loss

Businesses should definitely be using some sort of data backup service because lost data can be very costly. Almost half (46%) of all the businesses that participated in a 2001 survey claimed that one hour of downtime would cost them at least $50,000. Depending on the nature of the business, loss of data and downtime could actually cost millions by the hour. This is especially true for any businesses in the financial sector, as well as retail, insurance, manufacturing, telecommunications, and the like.

40% of Small to Medium Businesses don’t back up their data at all. This is probably because almost every type of business has (or should have) some sort of hard copy that they can work with and rely on if their computers go down, but what happens when your paper trail is destroyed along with your computers by some natural disaster? 60% of businesses that suffer a major data loss will close down within 6 months. 93% of companies that aren’t able to recover within 10 days of losing their data center (due to a disaster) have filed for bankruptcy within one year.

Final Ramblings

85% of computer users say that they are very concerned about losing important digital files and yet only 25% of us actually back up files frequently. If you’re interested in finding a backup service, please read my review of Carbonite (the service that I use.)

You can backup 2 gigabytes of data for free with a backup service named Mozy, but if you need more than 2GB of space – I suggest that you use Carbonite.