A new study from Handy Recovery Advisor reveals noteworthy insights about everyday users’ data security awareness and backup habits. While many users realize the importance of backups, gaps in their backup routines still leave their data vulnerable to potential threats.
Handy Recovery Advisor, a data recovery and management portal, surveyed 1,000 US everyday users about their data security awareness and backup routines. While the insights reveal positive tendencies, such as a 78% backup rate among users, it shows considerable gaps such as failure to differentiate between data backup and syncing, lack of data encryption on external drives, and irregularity in backup practices.
Odysseas Kourafalos, author and Chief Editor at Handy Recovery Advisor, comments on the intentions behind the study: “From the requests and feedback of our readers, we noticed a significant data breach increase in 2024. This tendency aligns with the growing global rise of data breach incidents affecting regular users and their data. Following this, we decided to explore the backup strategies of everyday users to see existing gaps in their backup routines and seek ways to fill those.”
While the Backup Rate is High, Consistency is Failing
The survey revealed an impressive 78% backup rate among users. Yet, further statistics show inconsistency in this practice, as only 33% of users run regular backups, 27% back up a few times a year, and almost 20% do so rarely.
More Than Half of Users Practice Selective Data Backup
About 52% of respondents practice a selective approach to data backup, relying on factors such as the importance and urgency of the data in question. Furthermore, the majority of users prioritize financial data and password information as top data types requiring backup.
Lack of Backup is the Most Frequent Reason for Data Loss
The survey revealed that for 34% the most common causes of data loss are accidental deletion and lack of data backup. Other frequent reasons include device failure and hardware malfunction (30%) and physical damage to a device (11.20%).
Additional Valuable Insights Include:
- 63% of respondents think syncing data with cloud storage means it’s fully backed, with half of them regarding themselves as tech pros;
- 37% of users prefer to save sensitive information on physical drives;
- 45% of Mac users have experienced problems when trying to back up their data
- 68% of respondents who have lost data now back up regularly
You can find a full report with the survey findings here.
Methodology
The survey, conducted via Pollfish on October 29, 2024, included 1,000 people from across the US, aged 18 to 75. Most participants were Millennials and Gen X, with 83% describing themselves as Intermediate or Advanced tech users.
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