Achieving Resilience: Data Loss and Recovery on Devices for Personal Use in Three Countries

Recovery from adverse incidents, such as accidents or cyber attacks, is a cornerstone of cyber resilience. Backups are essential in facilitating systems recovery. We have limited understanding of how devices for personal use are backed up, and of how data loss and recovery occur, including which factors might be helpful to afford resilience. To gain insights, we surveyed almost representative (in age and gender) samples of German, UK and USA populations, 1423 in total. Almost half of the participants (656, 46%) experienced at least one data loss incident. Whereas 42% of 656 participants recovered using backups, over half of them had outdated or incomplete backups. High levels of stress were reported, especially by those recovering without backups or with problematic backups. In the full sample, 86% of participants created full or partial backups of at least one of their devices, the most important trigger being prior data loss experiences.

CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy → Usability in security and privacy; • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.