Remotedatavault.com

Friday, March 19, 2010

Laptop Failure Rates


I read an interesting article that said 1 in 3 laptops die in the first three years.

The survey, conducted by a warranty services company, highlighted the following statistics: In the first 3 years of ownership, 31% of laptop owners reported a failure. Two-thirds of this failure (20.4%) came from hardware malfunctions, and one-third (10.6%) was reported as accidental damage. These findings compare quite well with the actual behavior of our users: on average, approximately 11% of our users have to do a full restore of their data each year. Over three years, that's 33% - in line with the 31% of owners reported by the survey. Another motivating statistic from our own users is almost half do a partial restore each year — mostly to recover accidentally overwritten or deleted files.

I'll bet that if you asked the average business owner or senior executive to estimate the likelihood of their computer data getting destroyed, they would assume lower number. At the end of the day, a 1 in 3 chance that you are going to lose everything on your PC or laptop is a clear indicator of the importance of online backup.