Acronis: 56% of IT users irretrievably lost their data last year

Acronis presented the results of its annual Cyber Protection Week survey, which it traditionally presents on the occasion of World Backup Day. This year’s report highlights the increasing number of personal or work data losses, but also the growing popularity of cloud backup.

Nearly three-quarters of IT users have already had to restore their data from backup at some point, and more than half will have irretrievably lost their data by 2021, whether due to human error, system failure, device loss or malware attack. Concerns about cyberattacks among ordinary users increased last year, but their backup habits have not changed much. For example, only one in ten users back up daily, while a full 34% back up only once a month and 41% back up irregularly or not at all.

Acronis’ findings, which come from surveying more than 6,200 IT users and IT managers in 22 countries around the world, also describe users’ gaps in IT security. 43%, for example, do not update their systems until a week after release. Nearly half are unsure whether their security tools will protect them from current threats. Although they are rightly concerned about phishing and ransomware attacks, they do not pay enough attention to other threats such as DDoS or cryptojacking.

Highlights from the survey include:

• 56% of ordinary users (or their family members) will have irretrievably lost their data in 2021, with 30% of them having lost their data once, 21% more than once and 5% even more than 5 times. Only 44% of ordinary users did not lose their data at all last year.
• Already 39% of users have had to recover their data at some point, 33% more than once and only 28% have not had to recover at all yet.
• 6% of users spent more than a full day restoring data, 15% less than a day, 46% less than half a day and 33% less than an hour.
• Only 10% of users back up their computers or mobile devices every day, 37% regularly and a full 43% irregularly or not at all.
• When it comes to storage, 54% of users are already backing up to the cloud, which is double the figure from 2019, before the pandemic. Commensurate with this, the use of local storage has almost halved (to 33%) and the most recommended hybrid backup is being done by 12% of users.
• Users are most concerned about credit card data theft, identity and password theft (65%), malware attacks (59%), phishing (49%) and ransomware (42%).
• Conversely, they have little idea about cryptojacking threats (only 26%), DDoS risks (20%) and attacks on home and IoT devices (19%)

The full survey can be downloaded here.