While in the office, IT professionals may devise and enforce data security and safety procedure, most home users do not take such precautions, Paragon Software Group, a provider of data backup, disaster recovery and data migration solutions has found in the results of a new survey.

The company found that 45 percent of home users did not perform automatic partition alignment, which the company says improves hard drive performance during partitioning. Another 58 percent did not use any kind of data virtualization services either.

Of the respondents, 40 percent said they had no plans to move from conventional hard drive technology to SSD drive technology. Getting rid of the complicated hardware of standard hard drives, with their whirling disk platters and heads and the potential for damage and data loss, could yield a significant improvement in reliability. Twenty-three-percent, however, said they did plan to use such a drive in the future.

When customers do switch drives, they often end up copying their data manually instead of using automatic tools like the kind Paragon offers.

While plenty of users recognize the need to back up their data, only 15 percent of those Paragon surveyed said they did so, and they usually backed up their files on the same drive as the one they were backing up. “While data backups are crucial components to disaster recovery, it’s just as important to have a safe place to host the backups,” Pavel Astafurov, supervisor of the survey, said. “By conducting this survey, we hope to bring some safer techniques and procedures to light.”

When users were finished with their old drives, around half of them simply formatted the drive, which meant that sensitive data could still be read off them by a skilled thief. Paragon Disk Wiper aims for 100 percent data erasure.

“According to the survey, the top three most important factors when selecting software like Paragon Hard Disk Manager and other Paragon Software products include reliability, performance and hardware/software compatibility,” Astafurov said. “We are very pleased that our users appreciate our products and are willing to entrust us with the protection and maintenance of their most valuable data, and that we fully meet the expectations of our customers.”