Most UK firms have a false sense of security when it comes to their disaster recovery strategy, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has warned.

Although 95 per cent of UK companies have some form of back-up facilities in place, a third of them store back-up tapes on site, while less than 20 per cent back up desktops.

And only eight per cent of companies have actually tested their disaster recovery plans.

These are the initial findings from the 2004 edition of the DTI's biennial Information Security Breaches Survey, carried out by a consortium led by consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The survey spoke to 1,000 UK companies, with a particular emphasis this year on back-up and recovery, explained Chris Potter, the PwC partner overseeing the project.

Two-thirds of of the survey's respondents had suffered an incident over the last year that required data to be restored from back-up, so it was no surprise that 88 per cent of respondents said they found it easy or very easy to justify the cost of back-up and recovery.

The full report will be published in April.

Michael Warren, channel director of online back-up software vendor Attix5, said that, for SMEs at least, "testing your disaster recovery strategy may in itself be a risky business".

But he added that he took heart from the fact that the survey reveals a trend, albeit gradual, for a growth in automatic back-up.

Around 78 per cent of big businesses are doing this with their servers, although fewer than half of smaller companies are doing the same.