Why Your Company Has More Copies of Its Data Than You Think

A 2026 Komprise survey says 74% of IT and storage leaders now manage 5+ PBs of unstructured data. But here is the trickier question: how much of that data is actually unique?

Ask a company how many copies of its most important file exist, and you may get a shrug dressed up as a number. Nobody is necessarily hiding anything. The truth is that nobody may actually know.

Follow one ordinary file through its first two years inside a company, and that shrug starts to make much more sense.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A single business file can have instances across devices, backups, cloud platforms, and archives.
• Most duplicate data is not created carelessly. It is often the byproduct of legitimate backup, collaboration, and retention processes.
• Poor visibility across systems makes redundant, obsolete, and forgotten data difficult to identify.
• Companies need to map where their data lives and determine which copies still serve a purpose.

The Day It Was Created

It’s a Tuesday afternoon. A finance analyst creates some pricing spreadsheets. Before she even hits save, her laptop has already saved it for her, twice, in the background, the way every note-taking app and office suite now does by default. 

She emails a version to her manager. 

And then, she saves a second version after his edits. However, neither of those first two autosaves ever gets deleted. They just sit there, quietly outnumbering the one file anyone actually meant to keep. 

Our own walkthrough on how to recover an unsaved Word document exists because this kind of silent duplication happens on nearly every machine, every single day.

The First Backup, and the One After That

That night, the spreadsheet gets swept into the company’s regular backup routine: one copy on the primary server, another on secondary storage, and perhaps one off-site in the cloud. It is standard practice, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Six months later, a ransomware scare puts IT on edge, and someone turns on more frequent shadow copies just to be safe, adding a fresh, full snapshot of the file every few hours for a week before anyone remembers to dial it back. 

That’s why it’s recommended to leave it to professionals and partner with the best data backup and recovery tools.

The Migration That Never Really Finished

A year in, the company switches email platforms. IT exports the old mailboxes just in case something breaks during the move, fully intending to delete the export once everything settles. 

Everything settles. 

The export does not get deleted. It sits on a drive somewhere, a complete second copy of every attachment, spreadsheet, and contract anyone ever emailed, including our spreadsheet. 

Tools like OLM or EDB to PST converters exist for exactly this reason, and a PST repair tool exists because half of these forgotten exports quietly corrupt long before anyone goes looking for them. 

Nobody circles back to check because nobody ran a data protection risk assessment before the migration to know what actually needed to survive it and what did not.

SURPRISING STAT

Backup environments represent the most data-redundant context in any IT infrastructure, duplication rates reaching 20:1 or even higher in virtualized server environments.

The Version Nobody Remembers Saving

Somewhere in that same year, three colleagues collaborate on the spreadsheet through a shared cloud folder. Dropbox quietly keeps up to 180 days of every version of that file. Google Drive keeps up to 100. 

Nobody asked for that history, and nobody is going to look at most of it. It sits there anyway, version after version, counted against the company’s storage the same as any file anyone actually uses.

The Seven Years It Legally Cannot Disappear

As the spreadsheet touches customer pricing, legal flags it to be retained. Now it has to survive for seven years, whether anyone opens it again or not. Multiple redundant copies are kept on purpose here because regulated industries treat losing a required record as a far bigger risk than storing three extra versions of it. 

What the Count Actually Looks Like

Add it up, and one spreadsheet has quietly become eight or nine files spread across six systems, and nobody signed off on any of it happening. Komprise’s 2026 survey of IT and storage leaders found that 74% now store more than 5 petabytes of unstructured data, a 57% jump over just 2024.

Veritas ran similar numbers years earlier in its Global Databerg study and found a third of enterprise data was already redundant, obsolete, or of no real use, sitting there for no better reason than nobody got around to deleting it.

Why Does Nobody Catch This in Time

Because no single person owns the whole picture. IT owns backups. Legal owns retention. The finance analyst just wanted to keep a copy of her own work. Every decision along the way was reasonable on its own terms.

Stacked together across an entire company, they add up to a mess nobody designed, and nobody currently owns.

Finding Out What You Actually Have

The answer is not fewer backups or looser retention rules. Both exist for good reasons, as the spreadsheet’s own two-year history shows. The fix is knowing what you actually have, where every copy of it lives, and which of those copies still matter, not by counting terabytes, but by mapping which of those terabytes are real and which are just the same file wearing a different name.

Three questions are worth asking before the next storage upgrade gets approved. Where does the most sensitive data actually live, all of it, not just the copy someone remembers? Who still needs each of those copies, and who is simply used to seeing them matter as well.

And if one redundant copy vanished tomorrow, would anyone notice, or would it just be one fewer disguise for the same file to wear?

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