How Do You Use FileShadow? Analysis of a typical customer and how they use our Cloud File Assurance service

How do you use FileShadow? We know many of the uses of FileShadow for photography, IT, family history, virtual desktops, etc., and we thought we would dig deeper into some of the usage patterns of our customers. So, we analyzed more than 2,400 FileShadow, Inc. customers’ storage patterns and found that users keep about 30% of their total files for their permanent library. That permanent library contains documents, images, PDFs and other files they don’t want to lose.

As you know, the proliferation of data can be a management nightmare. In an era where every minute YouTube users upload 500 hours of video, Zoom hosts 208,333 participants in meetings, and 102 MB of data is created for every person on earth, the average user tags about 30% of their desktop and online storage as the most important content they want to keep as their personal record.

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The average user and their storage

The average user stores about 13,000 files. Combined, more than 80% are images and PDFs. About 11% of all files are office documents*. Surprisingly, less space and files are used for video, even though that is a dramatically growing file type.

The average file size per user across all files is about 3.5 MB. The largest file sizes are for Creative Cloud and Lightroom accounts, averaging 13 MB and 19 MB, respectively. As far as file types, video is the largest average at 31 MB per file, whereas office documents average under 1 MB.

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* Office documents include the following: Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and Apple Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.

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The most popular storage locations

The most popular storage location, based on numbers of files, is Google Drive, followed by Dropbox. OneDrive and Network Attached Storage devices are a distant third and fourth place.

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Slack is an emerging platform for storage. FileShadow recently introduced FileShadow for Slack, an integration where users of both platforms can collect, preserve, curate and publish their content so teams can smoothly collaborate. All files posted on Slack—whether or not they are visible or archived in your Slack channels—are viewable, protected and searchable in FileShadow.

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