Australians Still Avoid Backing Up Their Data
Western Digital Global World Backup Day Survey Finds One in Four Surveyed Australians Still Avoid Backing Up Their Data
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. Yet, 26% of surveyed Australians still don’t back up their data, according to new research commissioned by Western Digital.
Western Digital today announced the results of a global research study by Researchscape, where 74% of respondents backed up their data automatically or manually. The top reasons for backing up personal data are fear of losing important files (80%), to free up space on their device (59%) and to protect against cyber threats (37%).
“It’s fantastic to see more people recognizing the importance of protecting their data,” said Stefan Mandl, Vice President, Sales & Marketing for APJ region, Western Digital. “World Backup Day is an important yearly reminder to everyone to back up 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, 48% of Australian respondents have already experienced data loss due to device failure, accidental deletion or cyberattacks.”
For respondents who don’t back up their personal data, 41% said they didn’t know how to, 25% don’t have enough storage space, and 29% think it takes too much time. 62% of respondents agree that they would back up 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 three copies of data, stored on two different types of media with one copy stored offsite, like in the cloud.
With free cloud storage limits quickly maxing out, many Australians are turning to a hybrid approach to protect their data. In the survey, 55% of respondents from Australia reported that they rely on free cloud storage, 39% have run out of space in the past six months, and 52% have had to upgrade to paid plans.
Additionally, 69% 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 — 42% use an external HDD, while 11% rely on network-attached storage (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 data storage solutions that streamline the backup process and meet today’s growing storage needs. Western Digital recently unveiled higher capacities across its portfolio, including a 26TB1 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 (local product availability may vary). Consumers can also back up their digital life and take data on-the-go with the WD My Passport®, 20th Anniversary Edition with industry-leading 2.5” portable HDD capacity of up to 6TB. WD My Passport devices also include Acronis® True Image for Western Digital software to more easily schedule backups of precious data.
The results in this report are from an online survey of 557 Australian respondents that was fielded from February 7 to 25, 2025 by Researchscape, an international market research consultancy.
For more information about Western Digital’s storage portfolio, please visit www.westerndigital.com.
About the Author
Adrian Gunning Adrian lives in Melbourne Australia and has a huge passion for gaming, technology and pop culture. He recently finished his a Bachelor of Journalism and is currently focusing on games journalism. When not writing and playing video games, Adrian can be found in Comics 'R' Us debating the pros of the DC Universe and cons of the Marvel Universe.
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