Why Online Backup?

Your computerized information is always at risk of loss, even with most common backup methods

• 100% of hard drives eventually fail. In fact, the hard drive industry has a name for it. They have specifications of what is called the “mean time between failure” i.e. how many hours on average before the drive of a particular model and build will fail, such as, for example, 500,000 MTBF, a common figure for hard drives. The real fail time is more accurately warranty period plus 30 days.¹ It is just a matter of time, and you hope it is not soon or at a bad time for you. Backup tapes are notorious for short life spans and unreliability for restore of needed files. There may not be research data on the failure of USB memory sticks (flash drives), but I know from personal experience that they fail, are unreliable, and are easily lost. How about you?

• Here are some stats from independent sources that are not in the backup business

• "As I mentioned in a recent column on mean time between failure, a couple of papers presented at FAST 07 (the USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies) showed that annual disk replacement rates are much higher than predicted, the well-held belief in a burn-in phase for hard disk life cycle was wrong, and the SMART (self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology) code in hard drives and storage management software—long touted by the industry as the best predictor of disk failure—was mostly a security blanket for IT managers." "One of the best methods to predict the failure of any device, storage or otherwise, is to simply count 30 days after its warranty."¹

• Two out of every five enterprises that experience a disaster go out of business within five years! 59% of companies cannot conduct business during unscheduled IT downtime. 40% of companies that cannot conduct business during a major IT outage go out of business within 5 years.²

• A Company that experiences a computer outage lasting more than 10 days will never fully recover financially. 50 percent will be out of business within five years.³

• An estimated 25 percent of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster.⁴

• 70 percent of small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year.⁵

• Of companies experiencing catastrophic data loss, 43% of companies never reopened and 51% of companies closed within 2 years.⁶

• 80% of companies that do not recover from a disaster within one month are likely to go out of business.⁷

• 75% of companies without business continuity plans fail within three years of a disaster.⁸

• Of those businesses that experience a disaster and have no emergency plan, 43 percent never reopen; of those that do reopen, only 29 percent are still operating two years later.⁹