The cost to the UK economy of restoring business data that has been lost due to either human error or IT failure has been estimated at more than £4 billion per year.

An independent survey of small to medium-sized enterprises found that more than 60 million working days are put in jeopardy each year as employees are forced to "down tools" while the IT department restores lost data.

The survey found that SMEs experienced some form of data loss approximately five times a year with each incident taking an average of almost seven hours to resolve.

Russ Johnson, the general manager of Adaptec, the data systems company which commissioned the research, said the antiquated tape storage systems employed by three out of four SMEs were to blame for the slowness of data recovery.

"The problem is that most people talk about backing up and archiving data, when what they should really care about is being able to restore the data quickly when they need it," he said.

"If you asked Britain's business owners if they could afford to lose a week of productivity from each of their employees, their answer would be a resounding 'no'."

Smaller businesses have traditionally favoured tape systems because they are cheaper to install, but they are up to 15-times slower to find and recover data than disk-to-disk systems.

Another drawback to tape is that it only stores data and not the applications or operating system. These have to be manually rebuilt before the lost data can be restored.

Mr Johnson said the potential cost in terns of lost time of using tape systems meant that disk-to-disk recovery, despite being more expensive, could be more cost effective for SMEs.

"With the price of disks falling to a point that is now almost comparable with tape, disk-based backup could now be a better solution."

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