UK firms are more likely than their continental counterparts to suffer prolonged downtime as a result of poor disaster recovery practices, claims research by storage vendor Acronis.

Some 600 SMEs from France, the UK and Germany took part in the study, which was carried out to gauge the differences in backup and data recovery practices between the three countries.

According to its findings, the UK has the worst attitude when it comes to data recovery, with 38 per cent of UK SMEs claiming to never back up. This compares to six per cent in France and nine per cent in Germany.

Despite this, the survey also revealed that UK firms are the most confident about making a fast recovery in the event of a hardware crash or computer virus.

David Blackman, general manager for Northern Europe at Acronis, said: “The UK’s attitude to data backup does not make much sense and it suggests that a lot of work needs to be done to educate them on this."

The survey also revealed that 63 per cent of organisations take a day or more to recover from system downtime.

Blackman added: “With little room for downtime in today’s business environment, it’s surprising that many companies still don’t carry out regular backups.”