Archive for July, 2010

Personal Disasters – scary statistics about data loss.

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

For a small, growing or even medium sized business a disaster can be caused by a hurricane or a tornado, by a fire, or simply by a wrong keystroke. One study shows that 50 percent of data loss is caused by user error. But no matter how it is caused, a loss of data, or access to data for any kind of extended period, inevitably means a loss of revenue, a loss of productivity, a loss of reputation, and increased costs.

Disasters that threaten a business can happen anywhere at any time.

Some rather startling statistics that are generally accepted in the data recovery field and reported by the University of North Carolina’s Information Technology Service:

  • A hard drive crashes every 15 seconds
  • 2,000 laptops are stolen or lost every day (in the US only)
  • 32% of data loss is caused by human error
  • 31% of PC users have lost all of their PC files to events beyond their control.
  • 25% of lost data is due to the failure of a portable drive.
  • 44% of data loss caused by mechanical failures
  • 15% or more of laptops are stolen or suffer hard drive failures
  • 1 in 5 computers suffer a fatal hard drive crash during their lifetime.
  • 60% of all data is held on PC Desktops and laptops
  • 40% of Small and Medium Sized Businesses don’t back up their data at all.
  • Scary isn’t it ? The worst thing is that reliable backup is not a complex or expensive thing to do…

    Impact of disasters on small business in the US – extract 1

    Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

    Extracts from a study by HP and SCORE called : “Impact on U.S. Small Business of Natural & Man-Made Disasters” A compilation of public and private sector intelligence. (complete study in pdf)

    Everything for this Gulf Coast Business was Washed Away by Katrina Makeup and wardrobe consultant, Adrienne Moncrief Hemphill has a similar story. She ran a small but thriving custom-label makeup business out of her Bay St. Louis, Mississippi home that was demolished by Hurricane Katrina. Essentially her most valuable possession was her mailing list of her some 500 customers she kept on her computer.

    She lost everything in the storm, her catalogs, her Web site, her inventory of products and most disastrous of all, her mailing list.
    She was able to relocate to Jackson, Mississippi where she faced the prospect of essentially starting her business over again from scratch.

    “I sat down with a woman who worked with me and we tried to recreate my customer list from memory,”

    “Eventually we were able to remember about 150 of the 500 customers I had. I was then able to get my web site back up and running and between the web site, a book I had written that has been on sale locally and various stories I have had in the local newspapers regarding my consulting business, over now a two year period maybe another 200 of my former customers have found me – I didn’t find them. So now I have back about 350 of the five hundred customers I had the day Katrina hit.”

    But she admits, it has not been easy. But she has learned a valuable lesson. Today all the data on her computer is backed up at a remote location.

    Is my data secure when I back it up to 77backup?

    Thursday, July 15th, 2010

    The short answer : yes

    The longer answer : yes.

    When you backup to 77backup, the first thing that happens to your data, before it leaves your machine, is that we encrypt it using the password you chose when you setup the program.

    This encryption means that only you can get at your data.  What’s more, several copies of your data are kept – so even if something horrible happens to OUR datacenter, then we’ll always have other copies.

    Backup sofware design

    Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

    For our dear readers, here is a capture of the design of our main module. more to come in the next days…

    online backup