For many, backup is not an option

According to a F-Secure’s survey conducted in eight countries, many people have gone through the painful experience of losing irreplaceable content such as family photos, music collections or crucial work documents.

In Sweden 31% of respondents say they have lost irreplaceable content, compared to 34% in the United States, 41% in Italy, 45% in Finland, and 60% in Poland.

Everyone fears losing their important files but in practice few people remember to make regular backups. In F-Secure’s survey only 56% of the respondents say they have stored or backed up their digital photos.

In all the countries surveyed, the most popular photo storage location remains the computer hard drive. Other storage preferences reveal some interesting variations between the countries.

DVDs and CDs are relatively popular storage media in Poland (41%) and the United States (28%) but less so in Italy (18%) and Finland (16%). USB devices are more commonly used for storing photos in Italy (18%) than in Finland, United States and Poland (7%).

External hard drives are much more commonly used for photo storage in Sweden (24%) and Italy (23%) than in the United States (10%) and Poland (5%). In the United States 16% of the survey respondents use the memory cards on the camera while only 3% do so in Poland.