90 People Per Minute

Wow. Is that possible? That’s what Webroot is reporting: that 90 people are losing data every minute.

Webroot, is a leading provider of security solutions for the consumer, enterprise and SMB markets. Their report, published yesterday indicates:

“Although 98 percent of PC users surveyed have antivirus protection on their computers and 95 percent use firewall protection, few have safeguards in place for their data. Only 18 percent currently back up data on a regular basis and nearly one in five had never backed up…and 46 million users lost some, if not all, of their valuable data last year because it was left vulnerable to hardware failure, software corruption and human error.”

Why? Or better yet, why not protect your data? Could it be that people with new machines start out with only minimal data files on their machines, and with minimal data to protect, they disregard the importance? Then as time passes they accumulate more data but never take the initiative to protect it?

I doubt that cost is the problem. Good online backup services are not expensive.

Could it be complexity? Again, that seems unlikely to me because it is easier (in my opinion) to create an online backup account than to make a hotel reservation online. And that’s not really hard.

Could it be fear? Fear that you will do it wrong? And thereby live under a false sense of security. This answer seems more likely to me. But not being a psychologist, and at the risk of overuse of a recently popular expressing, knowing for sure “would be above my pay grade”.

I’d love to hear other ideas about this question: 1 in 6 PC users have backups…why?