Fun facts about data loss

Not everyone knows that March 31st is the world backup day. On this day, it is imperative to protect something important, because on April 1 they can joke unsuccessfully over this important one. It is clear that we in Acronis could not pass by such a date. Previously, we conducted a survey on the most amusing story about data loss, but today, in honor of the world backup day, we decided to collect and post a variety of funny and not very much facts about backup.

Let's think about how our data may be lost. There may be a lot of reasons, there are even studies that will show us the most frequent causes of user data loss.



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It is not necessary to take for granted these figures, these are polls, and they may depend on many factors. For example, in Fukushima, the percentage of losses due to natural disasters was higher at a certain point in time than in other places. But you can take a list of these reasons and carefully consider them. Many people know what antivirus software is. It is certainly very useful and protects against well-defined threats, but what a small percentage when it comes to data loss! Or a human error. It would seem, what could threaten the history of correspondence, which is stored on the postal service, or your Facebook chat? But once you make a mistake somewhere, important data may disappear. Or here I have a smartphone of a very well-known company, and my wife has the same one. Both of us with a difference of a month just lost all the contacts from the phone book. These are already software problems. Fortunately there were backups. And so, contacts (especially workers) are already critical data.

Or the most common cause is equipment failure. For example, hard drives. HDD from one manufacturer can work flawlessly for several years, and the other - a couple of years less.

Also, the reliability of the hard drive is directly dependent on how long it is in active work. According to various sources, ~ 3% of HDD breaks in the first year with active use due to manufacturing defects. Then every year they already break in a probability of 6-8%. It should be noted that the figure is quite noticeable.



Yes, it is clear that this is Google data on its high-loaded disks and in the life of the home user the disks will probably work more reliably, but nonetheless. This is not about any disks in the clouds, but its own, with photos of your loved ones or coursework.

And if you look closely at another trend from the Gartner agency, which publishes forecasts and statistical studies in IT, then you can see an interesting trend. Here Gartner a couple of years ago published data on how often computers are replaced:



Visible clear trend to reduce the frequency of replacement of PC. That is, the average computer works longer, and therefore the probability of failure of its equipment increases markedly. Here you can still argue that, they say, they have changed less often, because smartphones and tablets are all around, which means that laptops are less active. And this is true, but apart from the fact that the probability of a disk failure is affected by the time of active work, it is also influenced by the number of on and off cycles, and this parameter is unlikely to be greatly reduced. Anyway, in order to do some more or less serious work, a laptop is required, and a tablet is indispensable, so the laptop is turned on once a day.

In addition to problems with equipment and external factors, there are other problems. There is such a well-established term Big Data. What it is? In short, this is unstructured data without a predetermined format (video streams, audio, text, GPS data, and so on, whatever) in a large amount. The problem of storing and processing this data is already in full swing for businesses, but I think it also begins to arise among home users. How many video recorders, action cameras, high resolution SLR cameras have appeared? You know, SLRs click so quickly, and people just like to do a bunch of frames of one moment, then to choose the best one? So, few people then analyze these frames to remove unnecessary ones. And you can not delete everything, because the vacation was the same memories. Today's hard drives store 500 times more information than 10 years ago. Why am I all this? The data itself and their volume are already beginning to present a problem.

There are plenty of statistical information on all sorts of businesses. According to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) in the United States, 40–60% of small businesses do not reopen after catastrophic data loss. Or from Garner again, 40% of small and medium-sized businesses that have their own local network with Internet access, will be subject to penetration by hackers, and 50% of them will not even know about it. Or about the money. The average cost of a day of downtime caused by data loss for a small business in the states is $ 12,500. According to the National Computer Security Association, without an adequate backup copy, the cost and time of data recovery is:

• 19 days and $ 17,000 to recover 20 MB of sales and marketing data;
• 21 days and $ 19,000 to recover 20 MB of accounting data;
• 42 days and $ 98,000 to recover 20 MB of engineering;

Engineering data - the most expensive, which is nice. And so, the numbers are pretty impressive. By the way, when preparing the article I ran into a problem. Finding some interesting numbers on RUNET was not so easy. Therefore it will be great if you share some interesting facts. Thanks in advance and happy backup!