Human Error, Not Computer, to Blame, People Realize

It doesn't do any good to blame the computer anymore. You're not fooling anyone.

A recent global survey on the causes of data loss conducted by Kroll Ontrack, found 40 percent of home, business, government and channel users of information technology believe - no doubt correctly - that "human error” is the leading cause of data loss.

This is up from 11 percent in 2005. In other words, we pretty much know by now that computers rarely make mistakes people don't tell them to make.

"Hardware and software errors still account for a significant amount of believed failures," the study found. Kroll officials say this result "illustrates the perceived complexity associated with implementing and maintaining today's storage technology."

Of course it could also be a case of a different set of people-- software programmers - being responsible for the mistake. Here's what the great benefit will be the day we actually do create artificial intelligence and teach computers to think: We'll have a believable excuse for our own stupidity.

Kroll Ontrack asked more than 2,000 participants from 17 countries across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific to explain the cause of their most recent data loss, and 40 percent of respondents believed that human error was "a leading cause," which is still about 59 percent too low.

"A further 29 percent identified hardware/system failure as the cause of their most recent data loss, which was reported as the cause of data loss by 56 percent of respondents in a similar survey in 2005," the survey says, adding that despite the reported decline in hardware/system failures, Ontrack Data Recovery engineers "have seen consistent percentages in hardware failures over the past five years."

In other words, the problem isn't getting better or worse, we're just learning who's really to blame.