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 announced the results of a global research study by Researchscape, where 87% of respondents worldwide 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 against cyber threats (42%). 19% do it because they were told to.
India has come out on top in terms of data backup habits, with 30% of respondents from India backing up their data daily – the highest around the world ahead of large economies like the US (27%) or the UK (23%). The survey highlights that external hard drives are one of the most popular backup solutions in India, with 54% respondents using them for data backup. This places India as the second highest globally in this category, just behind France at 59%.
"It's fantastic to see that Indian consumers recognizing the importance of protecting and backing up their data," said Owais Mohammed, Sales Director India, Middle East, and Africa at Western Digital. "World Backup Day is an important yearly reminder to everyone to safeguard their data and to educate fellow people in India who still aren’t aware of the impact of losing data. It’s also an opportunity to reinforce just how critical it is to protect what matters most—because all it takes is one small accident for data to be gone forever. In fact, 71% of Indian respondents have already experienced data loss due to device failure, accidental deletion or cyberattacks."
While data backup solutions seem to have traction in India, there still are some identified gaps in data protection practices. Surprisingly, 28% of Indian respondents — the second highest globally — do not back up their personal data, placing a high trust on their device's reliability.
It is recommended to follow the dependable 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.
Storing data in the cloud is clearly important as 77% of Indian respondents use cloud storage today. However, around the world, 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 in India are already embracing this approach — 54% of those surveyed use an external HDD, while 22% rely on network-attached storage (NAS) - the highest value worldwide. 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.
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. 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 6,118 respondents that was fielded from February 7th - 25th, 2025 by Researchscape, an international market research consultancy. Respondents were from 10 different countries.
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