A couple of weeks ago, I got spat of phone calls from customers who where using Carbonite and had a hard drive crash. Some were relaxed enough to listen to my instructions on how to restore, whilst others were a little stressed and wanted some clear direction on how to retrieve their data and get their business back up and running. I don’t blame, with our without Carbonite, I would be stressed too if it was my business data.

The stats say that 1 in 8 or 12.5% of hard drives fail, that was certainly an understatement in terms of the calls I received that week. Having tweeted this out, I instantly got a reply from a follower saying that they had also had a similar week.

It is a very common story when you listen to the calls that come in from small and medium sized business, particularly those using  an external hard drive or NAS as their only backup. Once they have experienced failure they instantly start looking for an online solution.

The Carbonite experience in Australia is that most people don’t look at their backup until a problem occurs or they get a technician in who does an assessment. That is the reality of this market.

The danger is that relying entirely on hard drives is risky because anything with mechanical parts has a probability of failing, particularly when the weather gets hot as it is in Australia at the moment.

My advice is that you keep your hard drives and you maintain them because a good backup strategy must include some form of local backup. You also stay one step ahead by investing in some online backup for those critical business files.