>"At any given time, between 3 and 5 percent of an organization's files are
lost or misplaced. The average cost of recreating a document is $180. Annual
loses for a Fortune 1000 company with one million files is $5 million
dollars" (Survey reported in Information Week). 
>"Six per cent of PCs will suffer an episode of data loss in any given year;
each incident costs an average of $2,557 to fix, including costs such as
retrieving and recovering the missing information, lost productivity,
technical services, and the data's average value" ( "The Cost of Lost Data
Report", Dr. David Smith, Pepperdine University).
>

At least this time there are sources cited as to who made these statements,
but until they show the data and process used to develop the numbers,
they're sort of meaningless.

Examine the first one- "at any given time between 3-5% of an organizations
files are lost or misplaced"

So this would assume that it takes into account "files" in a paper and
electronic sense, and that any/every organization knows exactly how many of
these "files" they have top begin with. I'd be willing to bet dollars to
donuts that they don't even accurately know the entire volume of "files"
within 10-20%, much less that they can determine 3-5% are lost or misplaced.

And what does a "file" consist of?  You can have a file and if one document
or record is missing from it, the file is still there, but it could be 
worthless.

And the second one? "6% of PCs will suffer an episode...each incident costs
an average of $2,557..."  Excuse me?  If you take an average employee's
salary at $25/hr plus 35% burden you're looking at $36.50/hr so that's
saying if the hardware, software, productivity and data had NO VALUE, once a
tech and a staff employee spend 70 hours determining what was lost and
repairing it, you're done spending $2557.  

You could conceivably spend more than that in the first day of notifying
customers of a data loss.

I dunno... every time this question comes up it never ceases to mystify me
who comes up with these 3-5% and $257 numbers to begin with and what they're
basing them on.  

Peter was correct about the data from ARMA relating at a specific example of
lost information categorized from the Diversified Records Fire and what it
would cost to recreate it from a third source, but even this only involved a
specified minimal amount of the data lost where it would be recreated from
microfiche, printed, and placed in boxes with requisite indexing.  As I
recall, some of what was lost in that fire included underground survey data
from storage tanks in gas stations that supported models indicating the need
to replace tanks to comply with EPA requirements, and if the surveys had to
be performed again, the cost would have far exceeded the $180 figure.

Larry
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