A survey conducted by Paragon Software Group has shown that a significant number of home users take care of basic data backup and defragment their hard drive, but at the same time do not use alignment, data erasure or any other data protection technology. Every third user knows little about virtualization.
June 13, 2012 - Paragon Software Group's online study is based on interviews with more than 10.000 users of Hard Disk Manager 11. Respondents were asked to answer 22 questions about their usual hard disk maintenance practices. The result of some questions can definitely be rated as positive, as for example the general trend towards regular basic data backups shows. However, the intervals between the individual backups are often too long: Many users only back up their data once a month. The survey also revealed gaps in the use of certain technologies.
"According to the survey, reliability, performance and hardware / software compatibility are the three most important factors when choosing data management software," said Pavel Astafurov, senior marketing manager for the survey. Backup and defragmentation are among the most popular hard disk operations: 80 percent of those surveyed said that they regularly took care of both. In contrast, around 45 percent of the interviewees did not make any use of realigning the partitions - although it has been proven that the hard disk performance can be significantly improved by partitioning, migrating and restoring a backup image. (The current hard disk manager 12 automatically realigns the partitions.) In addition, it was found that 58 percent are currently not using any virtualization programs - despite the efficiency and maintenance advantages that result from virtualization and storage in the cloud.
The majority do not use special migration tools
With regard to the external storage options, almost 40 percent of those surveyed said that they neither used an SSD nor planned to purchase it, while 23 percent were planning to move to an SSD at least in the near future. 66 percent of the survey participants do not use any special programs or tools for data and system migration when upgrading or exchanging their PC, but instead migrate their data manually and reinstall their systems. By automating their migration methods, users can be much more economical with their workload.
A full 15 percent of those who back up their data store their backup files on the same drive as the source files. "While data protection is a critical component of disaster recovery, a safe place that houses the corresponding copies is just as important," says Pavel Astafurov. "We hope that the results of this study will guide the public to some safe disk management techniques and practices."
Around half of all respondents either do not use a data erasure tool or only use the operating system-internal erase functions to erase personal information from the old hard drive. In this way, these users make any sensitive information available to anyone who gains access to the corresponding hardware. With a software solution such as Disk Wiper or with the erase functions of the Hard Disk Manager, Paragon guarantees 100 percent security when erasing data.
Source: press release (mh)