ForumsEvents

• Every year 43% of computer users lose irreplaceable files. Due to theft, irreparable damage or data corruption, these files could be unrecoverable through conventional means.

• Laptops are increasingly more common than PCs in businesses. Because of this, the possibility of theft increases, but only 3 out of 100 stolen laptops are ever recovered.

• The average cost of recovering data on a 160GB hard drive would cost $1,500 from conventional data recovery companies. The costs escalate when considering the lost productivity. On average a single data loss incident will cost an organization $2,900, including both the cost of data recovery and the cost of lost productivity.

• 6% of all PCs will suffer an episode of data loss in any given year.

• 35% or more of all PCs sold to businesses are laptops, and 1 in 5 of these laptops will suffer hardware failure in the first 3 years.

Causes of Data Loss

• Data can be lost through hard drive crashes, theft, power surges, natural disasters, or accidentally deleting your own files.

• Natural disasters can happen across the world without warning. Most people keep their external hard drives and DVDs in the same office or building as the computer they're backing up. So, should a disaster--hurricane, earthquake, fire--occur, both the computer and the data backup could be destroyed.

• Hard drive failure is the leading cause of data loss, accounting for 38% of data loss incidents. Although hard drive manufacturers claim less than a 1% failure rate, recent research by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University found that a 2%-4% failure rate is more common and under some conditions the failure rate may reach as high as 13%.

• 32% of data loss events are caused by human error. This can be from accidentally deleting a file, incorrectly partitioning a hard drive, or poor airflow around a laptop or desktop resulting in overheating, among other reasons.

• 13% of data loss incidents are caused by software corruption, which might include damages caused by system software or other programs (e.g., a virus attack).