March 31, 2014 at 12:05Fun facts about data loss
Not everyone knows that March 31st is a worldwide backup day. On this day, you must definitely protect something important, because on April 1, this important thing can be joked unsuccessfully. It is clear that we at Acronis could not pass by such a date. Previously, we conducted a survey on the funniest story about data loss, but today, in honor of World Backup Day, we decided to collect and post a variety of funny and not-so-very facts about backups.
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 common causes of user data loss
It is not necessary to take these figures on faith, these are polls, and they can depend on many factors. For example, in Fukushima, the percentage of loss resulting from 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 anti-virus software is. It is certainly very useful and protects against well-defined threats, but what a small percentage it is when it comes to data loss! Or human error. It would seem that it could threaten the history of correspondence, which is stored on the mail service, or your chat on Facebook? But once you make a mistake somewhere, and important data can be lost. Or here I have the smartphone of one very famous company, and my wife has the same. For both of us, with a difference of a month, all the contacts from the phone book simply disappeared. These are already software problems. Fortunately there were backups. And so, contacts (especially working ones) are already critical data.
Or here is the most common reason - equipment failure. For example, hard drives. The HDD of one manufacturer can work faultlessly for several years, and the other for a couple of years less.
Also, the reliability of the hard drive directly depends on how long it is in active work. According to various sources, ~ 3% of the HDD breaks in the first year with active use due to production defects. Then every year they break down in a probability of 6-8%. It should be noted that the figure is quite noticeable.
Yes, it’s clear that this is Google’s data on its heavily loaded disks and in the life of a home user, disks will probably work more reliably, but nonetheless. We are not talking about some kind of disks in the clouds, but ours, with photos of their loved ones or with term paper.
And if you carefully look at another trend from the Gartner agency, which publishes forecasts and statistical studies in IT, you can see an interesting trend. Here Gartner a couple of years ago published data on how often computers are replaced:
A clear trend towards a decrease in the frequency of PC replacement is visible. That is, the average computer lasts longer, which means that the probability of failure of its equipment is significantly increased. Here you can still argue that, they say, they have become less common, because smartphones and tablets are around, which means laptops are less active. And this is true, but in addition to the fact that the time of active work affects the probability of a disk failure, the number of on and off cycles also affects it, and this parameter is unlikely to greatly decrease. Anyway, to do some more or less serious work, you need a laptop, and you can’t get a tablet, so once a day the laptop is turned on.
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 (streams of video, audio, texts, GPS data, and so on, whatever) in large volume. The problem of storing and processing this data is already in front of businesses, but, I think, it also starts to arise among home users. How many video recorders, action cameras, high-resolution SLR cameras have we got? You know, SLRs snap so fast, and people just like to take a bunch of shots of one moment, and then choose the best one? So, few people then parse these frames to remove unnecessary ones. But you can’t delete everything, because the vacation was also memories. Today's hard drives store 500 times more information than 10 years ago. Why am I all this? The data itself and its volume are already starting to pose a problem.
There is still a lot of statistical information on various kinds of businesses. According to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) in the US 40-60% of small businesses do not reopen after a catastrophic data loss. Or from Garner again, 40% of small and medium-sized businesses that have their own local area network with Internet access will be hacked 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, the cost and time for 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 restore 20 MB of engineering;
Engineering data is the most expensive, which is nice. And so, the numbers are pretty impressive. By the way, while preparing the article I ran into a problem. Finding some interesting numbers on Runet was not so simple. Therefore, it will be great if you share some of your interesting facts. Thanks in advance and happy 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 common causes of user data loss
It is not necessary to take these figures on faith, these are polls, and they can depend on many factors. For example, in Fukushima, the percentage of loss resulting from 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 anti-virus software is. It is certainly very useful and protects against well-defined threats, but what a small percentage it is when it comes to data loss! Or human error. It would seem that it could threaten the history of correspondence, which is stored on the mail service, or your chat on Facebook? But once you make a mistake somewhere, and important data can be lost. Or here I have the smartphone of one very famous company, and my wife has the same. For both of us, with a difference of a month, all the contacts from the phone book simply disappeared. These are already software problems. Fortunately there were backups. And so, contacts (especially working ones) are already critical data.
Or here is the most common reason - equipment failure. For example, hard drives. The HDD of one manufacturer can work faultlessly for several years, and the other for a couple of years less.
Also, the reliability of the hard drive directly depends on how long it is in active work. According to various sources, ~ 3% of the HDD breaks in the first year with active use due to production defects. Then every year they break down in a probability of 6-8%. It should be noted that the figure is quite noticeable.
Yes, it’s clear that this is Google’s data on its heavily loaded disks and in the life of a home user, disks will probably work more reliably, but nonetheless. We are not talking about some kind of disks in the clouds, but ours, with photos of their loved ones or with term paper.
And if you carefully look at another trend from the Gartner agency, which publishes forecasts and statistical studies in IT, you can see an interesting trend. Here Gartner a couple of years ago published data on how often computers are replaced:
A clear trend towards a decrease in the frequency of PC replacement is visible. That is, the average computer lasts longer, which means that the probability of failure of its equipment is significantly increased. Here you can still argue that, they say, they have become less common, because smartphones and tablets are around, which means laptops are less active. And this is true, but in addition to the fact that the time of active work affects the probability of a disk failure, the number of on and off cycles also affects it, and this parameter is unlikely to greatly decrease. Anyway, to do some more or less serious work, you need a laptop, and you can’t get a tablet, so once a day the laptop is turned on.
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 (streams of video, audio, texts, GPS data, and so on, whatever) in large volume. The problem of storing and processing this data is already in front of businesses, but, I think, it also starts to arise among home users. How many video recorders, action cameras, high-resolution SLR cameras have we got? You know, SLRs snap so fast, and people just like to take a bunch of shots of one moment, and then choose the best one? So, few people then parse these frames to remove unnecessary ones. But you can’t delete everything, because the vacation was also memories. Today's hard drives store 500 times more information than 10 years ago. Why am I all this? The data itself and its volume are already starting to pose a problem.
There is still a lot of statistical information on various kinds of businesses. According to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) in the US 40-60% of small businesses do not reopen after a catastrophic data loss. Or from Garner again, 40% of small and medium-sized businesses that have their own local area network with Internet access will be hacked 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, the cost and time for 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 restore 20 MB of engineering;
Engineering data is the most expensive, which is nice. And so, the numbers are pretty impressive. By the way, while preparing the article I ran into a problem. Finding some interesting numbers on Runet was not so simple. Therefore, it will be great if you share some of your interesting facts. Thanks in advance and happy backup!