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By Ron Coates, 9 June 2003 11:19

NEWS Laptops have brought a new focus to the great digital divide between those who back up and those who don't. And we all know that many who claim to do it daily are lucky if they manage it once a week. It's a straightforward fact that mobile working and data integrity don't go well together. They are part of a recipe for disaster. Almost half of IT managers have no responsibility for mobile workers' data. That is the finding of a Dynamic Markets survey of 850 IT managers in the US, Europe and the Middle East. It found that IT managers are quite religious about backing up their installations and that 90 per cent of them back up email servers as a matter of course. But such diligence dies when it comes to mobile workers. Over a fifth of organisations make no provision at all for backing up laptops. And 32 per cent of IT managers leave back-ups to the end users. A third of companies use emails for contractual agreements with customers, suppliers and employees. Coincidentally, this is around the same figure for installations that don't back up emails on PC hard disks or in personal email folders. Judi Freeley, UK country manager for Veritas, the company that commissioned the survey, said: "It is apparent that in too many cases individual emails and files are overlooked by any back-up procedures." Almost half of the organisations surveyed did not back up emails and attachments in personal folders or on laptop hard drives. Now that emails are dragged into court with monotonous regularity, it behoves us all to take better care of our data. When was the last time you backed up you home PC or laptop? We'd like to know. Email your stories - of good or bad examples of backing up, naming names or otherwise - to editorial@silicon.com.