You could choose to simply keep your fingers crossed and hope you make it without online backup, but the stats tell another story.

25% of PC users loses data every year (Gartner Group)

7 out of 10 small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year (DTI/PriceWaterhouse Coppers)

15% of all lapstops are stolen or suffer hard drive failures (Gartner Group)

96% of all business workstations are not being backed up (Contigency Planning & Strategic Research Corp)

$55 billion costs due to virus attacks in the US alone. (TrendMicro)

30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. 70% fail within five years. (Home Office Computing Magazine)

31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control.

34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape back-up failures.

93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington)

American business lost more than $7.6 billion as a result of viruses during first six months of 1999. (Research by Computer Economics)

Companies that aren't able to resume operations within ten days (of a disaster hit) are not likely to survive. (Strategic Research Institute)