A survey conducted at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent summit in Las Vegas has found that 88% of IT pros surveyed admit that they have lost data due to a hardware failure, data corruption, malware, or accidental deletion.
On top of this, 38% said that they have never tested the recoverability of their backed-up data and 47% wait up to a month or more to back up.
The survey was conducted by CloudBerry Lab, unsurprisingly a backup solution provider for users of public cloud storage.
CEO of tape storage Spectra Logic, Matt Starr, told CBR recently that "humans are the number one cause for data destruction".
He argued that one of the most common causes of data loss is actually human error. Clumsy handling (physical and virtually) has erased data all the way thrugh human history, from paintings catching on fire to Time photographer Robert Capa losing photos of the US D-Day landings.
Other key findings from the survey of 100 IT pros found that 50% or respondents indicated that they don’t back up their personal data more frequently because they "simply forget to do it", and that they believe the death of tape storage is imminent, with just 5% indicating that they still use tape for backup.
