A new small business survey conducted by Seagate Australia has painted a pretty bleak picture of the nation’s backup practices — or lack thereof. According to Seagate’s research, nearly half of small businesses have lost work due to not backing up effectively, resulting in revenue losses of up to 10 percent. The following infographic maps out the damage.
Photo by Jaymis Loveday
Last month, Seagate surveyed 250 Australian small businesses of between 1 and 50 employees about their backup practices and its overall effect on business. The survey discovered that 45 per cent of respondents had lost work at least once, with 17 per cent admitting to losing important data on more than one occasion. Around half had lost work belonging to clients as a result of not backing up.
See also: There’s No Excuse For Not Backing Up Your Computer: Do It Now
Most of the respondents’ blamed their poor backup practices on either a lack of time (38 percent) or confusion around the technology (20 percent). As we recently reported, hard drive failure remains the most likely way to lose data among businesses that backup regularly.
Somewhat worryingly, 13 percent of respondents admitted that they backed up work to an internal computer drive. While 55 per cent of respondents reported backing up to an external drive that they plug into the computer, none of them had a comprehensive backup plan for all office device.
“It is fascinating to see that so many businesses are relying on the hope that their technology will not fail them when simple and cost effective solutions can be put in place without the need for dedicated IT resources,” said Seagate’s managing director for Asia Pacific and Japan, BanSeng Teh. “Hopefully this research will provide a timely reminder for them to develop best practice data protection solutions.”
You can peruse the rest of Seagate’s findings in the below infographic.
We’ve shown you how to set up an automated, bulletproof backup system and we’ve rounded up your five favourite online and offline backup tools. But we’re curious. How do you back up your computers, phones and tablets? Share your process and backup tools in the comments section below.
Comments
4 responses to “Australian Small Businesses Still Suck At Backing Up Data [Infographic]”
One of the issues I’ve encoutered with small businesses is that they don’t think as a business, they think as a home user. Also, It’s easy to say Backup but then companies who sell backup solutions tend to go overboard and try to sell big bad backups when most just need an external hard drive.
The info graphic states the research was conducted in 2004. I wonder how much things have changed in 10 years?
That’s a good point: the small print of the infographic says ‘2004’, but the article says Seagate commissioned this survey ‘last month’. Is that a typo in the small print, or did the author not pay close enough attention to it?
Given the numbers (of terabytes of data) and the technology discussed, I’m guessing it’s a typo.
Yeah, it’s definitely a typo. The survey findings were only released this week. UPDATE: The infographic has now been updated.