Posey's Tips & Tricks
Why Don't Users Back Up Their Data and How Can You Change That?
While shaming might be your first instinct, understand and explaining will have better results.
As someone who regularly writes and speaks about data backups, it sometimes seems strange to stop and think about the fact that most of my friends and relatives rarely, if ever, back up their data. And while it would be tempting to dismiss this lack of data backups as "not my problem," it kind of is my problem. Like anyone else who works in IT, I am often the first person that my friends and relatives call when things go wrong.
So with that in mind, I thought that it might be interesting to delve into why people don't back up their data and some possible strategies for modifying that behavior. As a side note, I am not writing this blog post as a way of shaming anyone, but rather as a thought exercise that will hopefully lead to more people backing up their data.
So why aren't people backing up their data? My guess is that there are probably any number of different reasons, but one of the big ones is probably normalcy bias. Normalcy Bias might best be described as dismissing the possibility that anything bad can happen. Someone who never backs up their data for example, might feel that there is no need to do so because they have never lost any data in the past and their device has always worked as it is supposed to. Hence, in that person's mind, there is no need to create a backup.
I have also occasionally seen this normalcy bias stem from a lack of understanding as to how technology works. I once had someone tell me that if their hard drive were to fail, that they would just get someone to install a new one and then everything would be back to normal. That person just assumed that their computer would automatically populate the new drive with a copy of their data, without the need for restoring a backup. They viewed a hard drive failure as being something inconvenient, but not catastrophic, much like a PC power supply failure.
Another reason that friends and relatives have occasionally given me for not backing up a device is that "there is nothing on there." This is probably the reason that I have heard given the most often over the years, and yet it still surprises me whenever I hear it. I'm guessing that those users who have said that there is nothing on their devices haven't really thought through what data truly exists or what the consequences might be of losing that data.
Of course, there are also those who though they might understand that data should be backed up, don't really even know where to begin. Rather than taking action to figure out how best to protect their data, they choose instead to dismiss the whole notion of backing up their data because they consider it to be overly complex. Similarly, I have talked to people who understand that data needs to be backed up, but assume that those backups are somehow being handled behind the scenes and that if something bad were to happen then they could simply call Microsoft, Apple, or whoever to get their data back.
So how do you convince a backup averse individual to start backing up their data? Unfortunately, there is no one single method that is going to work in every situation, but let me give you a few ideas.
First, help the user to understand their data's value. Nobody is going to back up their data unless they believe that the data is valuable enough to justify the inconvenience of creating a backup. Hence, help the person understand what it is that they stand to lose (tax returns and financial documents, irreplaceable photos or whatever).
In some cases, I have found that you may have to explain to someone that data backups are not a one-time process. I once asked a family member if they back up their computer and was told, "I already did that," As it turns out, they had made a backup a couple of years prior and assumed that they were now protected.
It may sometimes be necessary to patiently explain to someone why data is so vulnerable to loss and why data backups need to be performed on a regular basis. Of course normalcy bias can come into play and the person may assume that although it is technically possible for a disk to fail, storage failure is a rarity and that backups are something that is nice to have as opposed to being critically important. In such cases, you might remind them of someone that they know (or even a business or a celebrity) who suffered the consequences of a data loss event. It may also be worth reminding the person that data loss can occur even in the absence of a hardware failure. A single bad click can be enough to unleash a ransomware infection that destroys all of the data that is stored on a device.
Finally, if someone is backup averse, then do what you can to make the backup process easy on them. Perhaps you can configure an automatic backup to the cloud, or create a single desktop icon that when clicked will painlessly back up the entire system. The important thing is to make it so that the person can no longer justify the “it's too complex” excuse.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.