An industry study by the analyst firm The Diffusion Group surveyed more than 1,000 small business organizations about their data storage habits and revealed that nearly half of them conducted manual back-ups based solely on habit...

 Stats about business

  backup practices:

• 40% of Small and Medium Sized Businesses don't back up their data at all
• 60% of all data is held on PC Desktops and laptops
• 40 - 50% of all backups are not fully recoverable and up to 60% of all backups fail in general
• One-third of all computers sold are notebooks
• Mobile workers in North America have represented the majority of the workforce since 2003

Stats about the cost of recouping data:

• It takes 19 days and costs $17,000 to retype 20 megabytes of sales data
• The same volume of accounting data takes 21 days and costs $19,000
• Recreating data from scratch is estimated to cost between $2000 and $8000 per MB
• Insurance of business data is expensive, and in certain countries, insurance companies will not insure data
• 60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months of the disaster
• 72% of businesses that suffer major data loss disappear within 24 months

A national Harris Interactive survey of 597 computer users reveals:

• Nearly three out of five personal computer users have lost an electronic file they thought they had sufficiently stored
• One in four users frequently back up digital files, even when 85 percent of computer users say they are very concerned about losing important digital data
• 82 percent keep a hard copy of important documents they've also saved electronically
• Thirty-seven percent of the survey's respondents admitted to backing up their files less than once per month
• Nine percent admitted they have never backed up their files
• More than 22 percent said backing up information is on their to-do list, but they seldom do it

Miscellaneous stats about computer data loss:

• A hard drive crashes every 15 seconds
• 2,000 laptops are stolen or lost every day
• 32% of data loss is caused by human error
• 31% of PC users have lost all of their PC files to events beyond their control
• 25% of lost data is due to the failure of a portable drive
• 44% of data loss caused by mechanical failures
• 15% or more of laptops are stolen or suffer hard drive failures
• 1 in 5 computers suffer a fatal hard drive crash during their lifetime
• The overall average failure rate of disk and tape drives is 100% - all drives eventually fail

Of those companies participating in the 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey:

• 46% said each hour of downtime would cost their companies up to $50k
• 28% said each hour would cost between $51K and $250K
• 18% said each hour would cost between $251K and $1 million
• 8% said it would cost their companies more than $1 million per hour