Benjamin Franklin once said, “’In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Well, he got it wrong. He should have said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and the catastrophic failure of your hard drive the day before you were going to back it up.”

I remain amazed at the number of recovery jobs we receive, where the user has no backup whatsoever – let alone a recent offering. Typical reasons we hear are:

• “I have been meaning to copy my data to DVD for months.”
• “I thought hard drives were guaranteed to last for five years. This is only two months old and it has failed.”
• “I have too much data to back up.”
• “My Windows installation became corrupted so I used the laptop manufacturer’s utility to reload it – but it deleted all my data in the process.”
• “We had a power surge and it killed the file server. Our tape backups didn’t work.”
• “I don’t have time to spend backing up.”

Being in the data recovery business, I get to hear myriad reasons for data loss. Some are just plain bad luck, yet others are situations that could have been avoided with a little planning.

Users are simply not backing up their data as regularly or as securely as they were fifteen years ago.

Of course, there will be additional reasons for this phenomenon that I will miss in my analysis, and the reader is invited to enlighten me!