{"id":139,"date":"2009-06-19T14:04:02","date_gmt":"2009-06-19T21:04:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/19\/causes-of-data-loss-and-some-statistics\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T13:53:42","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T21:53:42","slug":"causes-of-data-loss-and-some-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/causes-of-data-loss-and-some-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"Causes of Data Loss and Some Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image140\" src=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/blog_statsloss.gif\" alt=\"Causes of data loss and statistics\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"bzdropcap\">Nearly one of two people (46%) lose data every year according to a study of Backblaze customers. Shocking? It surprised me at first glance, but then I dug in deeper.<\/p>\n<h2>Drive Failures<\/h2>\n<p>According to a Google study of <a href=\"\/blog\/life-and-times-of-a-backblaze-hard-drive\/\">hard drive<\/a> failures, disk drives over a year old have about a one in 10 chance of failure each year. At this rate one of every two drives will fail every five years. A person that has a hard drive in their computer and an external drive for that period is nearly guaranteed to have one die.<\/p>\n<h2>Computer Theft and Computer Loss<\/h2>\n<p>15% of households annually experience <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20090919170420\/http:\/\/www.ojp.usdoj.gov:80\/bjs\/glance\/tables\/proptrdtab.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">burglary or theft<\/a> according to the Bureau of Justice. While statistics are not available for what was stolen, when a home is burglarized, a computer is a likely target. According to the Ponemon Institute, 637,000 laptops are lost at airports across the country every year. How many more in taxi cabs, coffee shops, and at vacation destinations?<\/p>\n<h2>Viruses and Software Corruption<\/h2>\n<p>Various surveys across the web have shown that viruses cause 4-7% of all data loss. Add software corruption to the mix, boot sector issues, registry issues, etc., and this starts becoming significant.<\/p>\n<h2>Flooding, Fire, Earthquakes, and Other Disasters<\/h2>\n<p>According to FEMA, about one in 10 households that <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20100422233744\/http:\/\/www.fema.gov:80\/business\/nfip\/statistics\/cy2007pif.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">have flood insurance<\/a> suffer a loss each year due to <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20100112084053\/http:\/\/www.fema.gov:80\/business\/nfip\/statistics\/cy2007losspd.shtm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">flood damage<\/a>. Half a million buildings catch fire every year based on USFA statistics. Nearly 200 earthquakes with a magnitude of 6.0 or greater occur worldwide annually according to the USGS. Computers are sensitive devices and don&#8217;t like to be wet, <a href=\"\/blog\/it-can-sometimes-be-a-problem\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">hot<\/a>, or shaken.<\/p>\n<h2>Human Error<\/h2>\n<p>&#8220;Oops&#8221; is the second most common cause of data loss (after hardware failure) according to data recovery specialist <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ontrackdatarecovery.com\/understanding-data-loss\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ontrack<\/a>. Is the delete key too big on the keyboard? Blame it on that&#8230; but all of us have done it and wished there there were an undo key that was just as big.<\/p>\n<p>Losing data doesn&#8217;t always mean a hard drive crash. Sometimes it just means we deleted a folder (with our kids&#8217; photos) or our dog knocked over an external drive (with our music library). Whatever the cause, based on the actual needs of our customers, the various causes of data loss compile to require one of every two customers to restore data each year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly one of two people (46%) lose data every year according to a study of Backblaze customers. Shocking? It surprised me at first glance, but then I dug in deeper. Drive Failures According to a Google study of hard drive failures, disk drives over a year old have about a one in 10 chance of&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/causes-of-data-loss-and-some-statistics\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Causes of Data Loss and Some Statistics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[121,11],"tags":[469],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-backing-up","category-data-loss","tag-consumerbackup","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Common Causes of Data Loss and Data Corruption<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Nearly one of two people (46%) lose data every year according to a study of Backblaze customers. Shocking? It surprised me at first glance, but then I dug\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/causes-of-data-loss-and-some-statistics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Common Causes of Data Loss and Data Corruption\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Nearly one of two people (46%) lose data every year according to a study of Backblaze customers. Shocking? It surprised me at first glance, but then I dug\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/causes-of-data-loss-and-some-statistics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage &amp; Cloud Backup\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/backblaze\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-06-19T21:04:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-12-12T21:53:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/blog_statsloss.gif\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"537\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"336\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Gleb Budman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@backblaze\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@backblaze\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Gleb Budman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Common Causes of Data Loss and Data Corruption","description":"Nearly one of two people (46%) lose data every year according to a study of Backblaze customers. Shocking? It surprised me at first glance, but then I dug","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/causes-of-data-loss-and-some-statistics\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Common Causes of Data Loss and Data Corruption","og_description":"Nearly one of two people (46%) lose data every year according to a study of Backblaze customers. Shocking? 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Gleb has served as a member of our board of directors since 2009 and as chairperson since January 2021. Prior to Backblaze, Gleb was the senior director of product management at SonicWall and the vice president of products at MailFrontier, which was acquired by SonicWall. Before that, he served in a senior position at Kendara, which was acquired by Excite@Home, and previously founded and successfully exited two other startup companies.","url":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/author\/gleb\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/blog_statsloss.gif","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}