87% of Consumers Actively Backup Their Content

Consumers have become more reliant on personal data for everything from health records, financial documents, home video and photos, social media videos and more, and many are realizing the importance of backing up data.

Western Digital Corporation announced the results of a global research study by Researchscape International, where 87% of respondents cite that they backup their data automatically or manually.

The top reasons for backing up personal data are fear of losing important files (83%), to free up space on their device (67%) and to protect vs. cyber threats (42%). 19% do it because they were told to.

“It’s fantastic to see more people recognizing the importance of protecting their data,” said Nitin Kachhwaha, director, product management, Western Digital. “World Backup Day is an important yearly reminder to everyone to backup their data and to educate the people who still aren’t aware of the impact of failing to backup. It’s also an opportunity to reinforce just how critical it is to safeguard what matters most-because all it takes is one small accident for data to be lost forever. In fact, 63% of respondents have already experienced data loss due to device failure, accidental deletion or cyberattacks.”

For those respondents who do not backup their personal data, 36% still think they don’t need to backup their data, 30% don’t have enough storage space, 29% think it takes too much time, and 23% don’t know how. 63% of respondents agree that they would backup data more frequently if it was automatic and effortless.

A dependable backup practice is to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy, where consumers should have 3 copies of data, stored on 2 different types of media with 1 copy stored offsite, like in the cloud.

With free cloud storage limits quickly maxing out, many consumers are turning to a hybrid approach to protect their data. In the survey, 78% of respondents reported that they rely on free cloud storage, 60% have run out of space in the past 6 months, and 56% have had to upgrade to paid plans. Additionally, 35% find cloud storage increasingly expensive.

This is driving more people to adopt a combination of both cloud and local external storage to ensure data protection and cost efficiency. External HDD storage, offering up to 26TB in a single drive, provides a cost-effective solution to complement the cloud, and many consumers are already embracing this approach – 45% use an external HDD, while 19% rely on NAS. By diversifying storage methods, users can maintain reliable backups while managing growing cloud costs.

Western Digital provides consumers and businesses alike with easy-to-use storage solutions that streamline the backup process and meet growing storage needs.

Western Digital recently unveiled higher capacities across its portfolio, including a 26TB WD Red Pro CMR HDD for NAS environments and an entire suite of 26TB-based G-DRIVE and G-RAID external storage solutions for consumers, creative professionals and content creators to help protect and enable their digital workflows. Consumers can also backup their digital life and take data on-the-go with the WD My Passport, 20^th Anniversary Edition with 2.5″ portable HDD capacity of up to 6TB. WD My Passport devices also include Acronis True Image for Western Digital software to schedule backups of precious data.

The results in this report are from an online survey of 6,118 respondents that was fielded from February 7 to 25, 2025 by Researchscape, an international market research consultancy. Respondents were from 10 different countries.