We have good news and we have some, well, not so good news.

The good news? According to a study, “The Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012,” this is the first year worldwide server virtualization adoption will be more popular among small and mid-sized businesses than at the enterprise level.

This year, SMB adoption of virtualization will be 21 percent, the study concluded. Adoption overall ranges from Hong Kong, where 55 percent of businesses say over half their production servers are virtualized, to Italy, where 41 percent of all midsize companies have no virtualization at all, and about 10 percent of all companies have at least half of their production servers virtualized.

Things won’t be quite as heady as predicted a while back, when studies thought that the percentage of virtual servers being used by 2011 would hit 33 percent. The Acronis survey found the 2011 number to actually be 24 percent. Not bad, though, as the survey notes that’s still about a 20 percent increase.

As the survey’s authors put it, while virtualization is making “huge inroads” around the world, it’s still very much an opportunity.

And contrary to what you might think, SMBs aren’t just turning to virtualization because it’s cheaper. In fact, “cost savings” came in third on the survey’s list of reasons for SMBs to virtualize at 18 percent, behind “increased efficiency” at 24 percent and “flexibility and speed of deployment” at 20 percent. Both of which, of course, ultimately reflect cost savings. But focusing primarily on paying less on business technology wasn’t the No. 1 reason.

The numbers are encouraging, especially the list of reasons SMBs virtualize, as they show that growth is steady and not a bubble, and that SMBs are learning to make the ROI case first, instead of rushing out with “It’s cheaper!” as the sole operational rationale for virtualization.

OK, now it’s time for the not-so-good news. The survey also uncovered the dirty secret that “most companies are falling short when it comes to protecting” their virtual data, finding that 33 percent “do not back up virtual servers as often as their physical ones, and a measly 37 percent perform daily backups for their virtual machines.

As the title of the study might have hinted, this is a particular area of focus for the research: What happens to your data in the event of a disaster -- earthquake or flood, virus or malware, server issues, power outages, theft or just good old-fashioned human error?

Here’s where the increasing virtualization among SMBs could be a problem: The survey discovered that fully 86 percent of businesses surveyed had experienced some sort of significant downtime due to a disaster over the past 12 months, but only 37 percent of SMBs back up their virtual data daily.

In fact, the study found that significant percentages of companies in places such as Australia, Italy, Brazil and Russia, locations rather prone to natural and other disasters didn’t have any offisite backup strategy beyond crossed fingers.

Other than “Back up your data off-site daily, people, what’s wrong with you?” of course, the study recommends “taking a holistic approach to backup and Disaster Recovery,” which “requires tools that can address backup and DR across physical, virtual and cloud environments.” What about mobile devices? Are those figured in your data backups? It’s getting complicated.

Yes, virtualization’s great, and it can really help, but ultimately you’re responsible for your own data.