Boomers backup best?

Stephen Withers
Monday, 24 October 2011 12:32

Your IT - Home IT

 

A survey has found that baby boomers have a more sophisticated approach to backup than younger Australians.

 

The Netgear-sponsored survey that found over a quarter of Internet-enabled devices aren't actually used online also revealed that baby boomers have the most sophisticated backup measures for digital content, even though Gen Y has more digital content and are "the most likely to feel upset or devastated if they lost [it]," according to Netgear officials.

 

The survey, conducted by Galaxy Research for Netgear, found 15% of boomers back up to NAS devices (vs 12% for all age groups) and 5% back up to the cloud (vs 6%).

However, the survey only covered Australia aged between 18 and 54, ie those born after 1957. Although exact definitions vary, most observers would agree that current 65 year olds are boomers, and there are suggestions that early and late boomers do not form a homogenous group.

But you could argue that it's not the destination device that matters as much as the frequency and regularity of backup. For example, an automated and more or less continuous backup to a USB-connected hard drive is arguably more sophisticated than manually copying media files to a NAS on an irregular basis. The research appears to be silent on this issue.

One of the more surprising findings was that people with more than 1000 music tracks and more than 1000 photos or home videos were more likely to be "not too concerned" about losing those files than those with smaller collections. It's easy to see how that could be the case if respondents were thinking in terms of losing a relatively small number of files, but the prospect of losing the entire collection is surely more daunting.