Laptop failure rates

Found an interesting article on Yahoo news this morning: it seems that 1 in 3 laptops die in the first three years.

The report was based on a survey conducted by SquareTrade, who is a US warranty company. In summary it highlights the fact that during the first 3 years of ownership, 31% of laptop owners reported a failure to SquareTrade. Two-thirds of this failure (20.4%) came from hardware malfunctions, and one-third (10.6%) was reported as accidental damage. The complete report is available here: http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf

These findings correlate with the general experience of most Carbonite users around the world: approximately 11% of our users have to do a full restore of their data each year. Over three years, that’s almost exactly the same 33% number. Furthermore, almost 50% of people using Carbonite do a partial restore each year — mostly to recover accidentally deleted files.

Most people wouldn’t believe you if told them these stats. Having a 1 in 3 chance that you are going to lose everything on your PC only highlights why online backup is so important.