Ontrack recovers 103PB of data in 25 years

Kroll Ontrack, a provider of data recovery, information management and legal technologies, products and services, has released new statistics regarding how the creation of storage technologies and digital information has impacted data loss and data recovery technology since the advent of the personal computer in the 1980s, Market Watch writes.

Since the first Kroll Ontrack data recovery lab opened in 1987, more than 103 petabytes (PB) of data, which could be stored on 25 million USB flash drives with 4GB capacity, has been recovered.

This compares to 1.2GB of data initially recovered in 1987, which is one-500th of the capacity available on today's average hard drive.

However, in 2011, the amount of data recovered by Kroll Ontrack was nearly 35 million GB (35PB), while the number of computers estimated to be impacted by data loss reached nearly 1.4 million compared to 33 000 in 1987.

The sheer volume of big data requires businesses to utilise tools to help manage the information, but the importance lies in how the data is interpreted, Ontrack Data Recovery says.

“While it's becoming a requirement to create and keep hold of abundant data, most businesses will prefer to invest in a solution that automatically extracts the knowledge inherent in the data over a simple storage solution,” says Jonathan Bowers, communications director at hosting company UKFast.