世論 What Japan Thinks

Following up on yesterday’s broken digital cameras, today we look with goo Research again, reported on by japan.internet.com, into hard disk faults.

Demographics

Over the 27th and 28th of January 2009 1,092 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.7% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.7% in their twenties, 21.2% in their thirties, 16.0% in their forties, 15.3% in their fifties, and 12.3% aged sixty or older.

I had a hard disk crash a few years ago and lost perhaps 20% of my photo collection. I now use Vista’s built-in backup tool to do weekly backups, but I’m not convinced at all that it is backing up everything it should be, and it has a funny habit of spewing out errors on boot-up on days it isn’t running. Can anyone recommend a cheap or free backup to DVD software package for Vista?

Research results

From the sample, 1,021 people, or 93.5%, had a home computer. I don’t what fractions of the other 71 people use work computers, internet cafes, consoles or mobile devices to access the internet.

Q1: Have you ever experienced an internal hard disk failure on your own computer? (Sample size=1,021)

Yes	38.8%
No	57.7%
Don’t remember	3.5%

Of the 1,021 people with home computers, a perhaps surprisingly high percentage, 35.1%, or 383 people, had external hard disk drives. They were asked the same question.

Q2: Have you ever experienced an external hard disk failure on your own computer? (Sample size=383)

Yes	21.7%
No	76.5%
Don’t remember	1.8%

Putting the “Yes” answers together from the above two questions gives a total of 409 people, or 40.1% of the computer-owning population, who have had a hard disk failure. This also means that 67 people, or 6.6%, have had both internal and external disk failures. 133 people, or 32.5% of those who had experienced failures, had tried using data recovery software to get their stuff back. However, the percentages recovering from recent backups, manually recovering, using external recovery services, and just binning the drive are not reported. These 133 were asked the following.

Q3: How much data did the recovery software restore? (Sample size=133, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Almost nothing	54	40.6%
One or two tenths	6	4.5%
Three or four tenths	14	10.5%
Five or six tenths	20	15.0%
Seven or eight tenths	18	13.5%
Nine tenths	21	15.8%
All of it	20	15.0%