Abstract:

Contemporary information exchange is basing on digital data stored and distributed in different manners and specific processes. The distributed amount of data is constantly growing in everyday life including sensitive user's personal data. The amount of personal data in the comparison to the data flowing thru the communication lines daily may appear insignificant. However, every stored byte of personal data has the same importance as any other streams of data on the public or enterprise networks. The importance of person’s data is too often underestimated and therefore handled without sufficient care. The awareness of data value and its underestimated data protection emerges immediately after data loss or data inaccessibility occurs. Data loss can happen in many different ways like careless handling of storage media or devices, hardware failure, ransomware etc. The most often appearing reason is accidental deletion of important files or overwriting the existing ones. We understand the term careless handling as keeping the data on single media without backup or using unreliable media like USB flash drives. According to the researches, the USB flash drives are the least appropriate media for data storage or protection due to their notorious unreliability and proneness to mechanical or electrical failures. However, making data backup on the USB flash drives is still very popular among the users despite of many accidental data loses. Irrespective from the way of losing data the importance of reliable backups is obvious. Unfortunately, the attitude toward reliable data protection is unsatisfying, sporadic or even not existing. Losing of data can be very inconvenient or disastrous for students or professional teachers. Especially in teacher’s profession, it is very important to keep different data secured from unauthorised access or accidental loss. The surveys among the students (future teachers) are aimed to discover the habits in securing data. The gathered results show that the understanding of the importance of data backup among students is very low. The students (future teachers) are very careless about securing their data. About 45 % of students do not create any backups of their files. Around the third of the students, create backups only a few times in a year. Monthly backups are rather occasional appearances, only handful of students create regular backups. We have followed the trends thru the period of last three years and we could not see any significant shift toward better and reliable data protection. The attitude is the same for all the students and we could not find any differences dependent on the study program or the age of students.

In general students use two backup media:
(1) USB Flash drive, and
(2) the external hard drive.

Some students use the PCs secondary hard disk as the backup destination. The students in our survey have acknowledged at least one event of data loss in certain period. Despite of losing data the student’s general opinion is that data losses occur too rare to care about the backups. Some of the students protect only the crucial data and just a few students have established the reliable system for data protection. The results of our research are perfect guidelines by modifying of the learning contents at the study course of ICT in the Education. Among other topics, emphasizing the importance of data protection is necessary and obvious.

Keywords:

Data protection, data backup, data loss, education, ICT, future teachers.