{"id":311,"date":"2011-02-24T18:21:22","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T02:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/?p=311"},"modified":"2025-12-12T14:57:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T22:57:10","slug":"51-of-americans-have-lost-digital-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/51-of-americans-have-lost-digital-content\/","title":{"rendered":"51% of Americans Have Lost Digital Content"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/blog-51loss.jpg\" alt=\"data loss survey\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"bzdropcap\">Deloitte published the results of its fifth &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.prnewswire.com\/news-releases\/deloittes-state-of-the-media-democracy-survey-tv-industry-embraces-the-internet-and-prospers-115002929.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">State of the Media Democracy<\/a>,&#8221; which shares the results of a poll of about 2,000 American consumers. While there are a number of interesting results from the survey that demonstrate the increase in smartphones and continued viewing of TV and reading of magazines, here is a stat that might be shocking to those who back up their data:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>51% of Americans have experienced a computer or <a href=\"\/blog\/managing-for-hard-drive-failures-data-corruption\/\">hard drive failure<\/a> that caused them to lose photos, movies, or other digital content.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That is over 100 million people that have<a href=\"\/blog\/youve-lost-data-without-a-backupnow-what\/\"> lost data<\/a> they have created! Considering the availability of easy and inexpensive <a href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">unlimited backup<\/a> solutions such as Backblaze, no one should ever <a href=\"\/blog\/causes-of-data-loss-and-some-statistics\/\">lose data<\/a> as a result of a hard drive failure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Deloitte published the results of its fifth &#8220;State of the Media Democracy,&#8221; which shares the results of a poll of about 2,000 American consumers. While there are a number of interesting results from the survey that demonstrate the increase in smartphones and continued viewing of TV and reading of magazines, here is a stat that&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/51-of-americans-have-lost-digital-content\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">51% of Americans Have Lost Digital Content<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[121,12,11],"tags":[469],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-backing-up","category-backup-news","category-data-loss","tag-consumerbackup","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Survey Shows 51% of Americans Have Lost Digital Content Forever<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Deloitte published the results of its fifth &quot;State of the Media Democracy,&quot; which shares the results of a poll of about 2,000 American consumers. While\" \/>\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\/51-of-americans-have-lost-digital-content\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Survey Shows 51% of Americans Have Lost Digital Content Forever\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Deloitte published the results of its fifth &quot;State of the Media Democracy,&quot; which shares the results of a poll of about 2,000 American consumers. While\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.backblaze.com\/blog\/51-of-americans-have-lost-digital-content\/\" \/>\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=\"2011-02-25T02:21:22+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-12-12T22:57:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/blog-51loss.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"188\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\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=\"1 minute\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Survey Shows 51% of Americans Have Lost Digital Content Forever","description":"Deloitte published the results of its fifth \"State of the Media Democracy,\" which shares the results of a poll of about 2,000 American consumers. 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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\/2019\/06\/blog-51loss.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","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=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}