The number of companies making copies of data to protect it has dramatically risen in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Wilma this year, but most of those companies are keeping that duplicate data locally where it's still vulnerable to disasters, according to a survey released yesterday by Gartner Inc. The September survey of 104 North American IT managers showed that 45% of respondents back up or replicate data to another disk, up from just 6% who did so in 2004. But 70% of the respondents who make backups do so to a local device.

Adam Couture, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, said that if companies hope to truly protect their data, they have to electronically copy it to an off-site facility either owned by the company or a service provider.

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