A new report from The Diffusion Group finds among U.S. households with broadband who either have or intend to create a home network, 54 percent back up their home data "a couple times a year" or less. Just over 20 percent of respondents claim to back up their home data at least once per week, with just over 7 percent reporting they back up their home data several times a week or daily.
The report surveyed just over 1,100 U.S. households with broadband Internet connection which either have or intend to set up a home network. Among respondents just under 7 percent reported they have no idea how often they back up their home data—such as documents, personal and financial data, and multimedia files like digital pictures and home video—while over 16 percent reported they never back up their data.
The report’s findings may indicate a misplaced faith in the reliability of digital storage mediums such as hard drives, or a simple lack of awareness that personally important or irreplaceable data can be lost when a hard drive fails, or a computer is damaged or stolen. Despite the enhancements to capacity and reliability storage manufacturers have been able to provide over the last several years, it’s no exaggeration to say that the failure rate of digital media remains at 100 percent: it’s a question of when, not if.
Among survey respondents who back up their data (at any frequency), 61 percent report burning their content and files to CDs as a form of backup, while 27 percent burn their content to DVD—perhaps indicating convenience trumps long-term viability, since writable optical media can be unreadable in only a few years, depending on storage and environmental factors. Fully a third of respondents report backing up data to external hard drives, 9 percent to a server, 6 percent to an online storage service, and 8 percent to network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
According to the report, the amount of digital data generated in the home will increase from approximately 322 GB in 2005 to nearly two terabytes (2,000 GB) in 2010.
