Back it Up! Hard Drives Do Fail

Hard drive crashes are never fun. They usually result in stress and extra cost to repair or recover data. Whether your main drive, a back up drive or a secondary drive crashes, a mess always has to be cleaned up, data lost and things are never the same again. Computers are not immune to crashes.

A hard drive crash is when the hard drive fails to respond or starts loosing data. With hard drives people most often notice slowing down of a system, failure to boot, cyclic redundancy checks, data loss showing as garbled files or files even missing files.

Some computer crashes are preventable, but most are inevitable and bound to happen over time. Mechanical failure due to wear and tear, heating and cooling, shocks and electrical surges - talk with any computer tech and they'll say it's not a question of how or why, but when. The majority of us take technology for granted, it looks sleek and it's supposed to simplify our lives, but when it stops functioning like we want it to we want to take a hammer to it or throw it out a window.

Its amazing how much technology we have designed to simplify our lives but we end spending hours and hundreds on keeping that technology running smoothly and up to date. In reality technology keeps us busy in a different way than doing things manually.

One of the ways to prevent data loss in case of a crash is to back up your data. Save the important things to a second place like a thumb drive or a external hard drive or even take the extra time to burn it to CD or DVD. In the business world, most companies have large amounts of data and they employ other companies to back up and secure their data. Many consumers don't ask if their data is secure and safe. We usually assume that a company has a fail-safe method of keeping our data stored. They do have back ups for the most part but there is no 100% guarantee that it will be there forever.

PC's are now a necessary technology in life. Not everybody has one, but most people use one. You can't turn in any direction without seeing the impact they have on our day to day routine - transit systems run on them, banks use them, even cars use them. Most computers come with back up software and a little instruction guide on how to back up your system. We tend glance at the papers and set them aside or discard them thinking that it will never happen to us.

Those of us who work in the computer industry are forever telling people to back up their data or risk loosing it at some point. However having learnt from a recent experience we don't always listen to our own advice. My back up hard drive CRASHED recently while recovering the data to my computer after a clean install. Needless to say I'm still missing information that I was trying to keep safe.

Backing up your systems hard drive will help to keep important files safely stored. If a system failure happens, you shouldn't lose important documents, media files or precious pictures. From time to time verify occasionally that your data is intact and the back up drives are working as well.

The cost of backing up your hard drive is far cheaper than trying to recover data from a failed hard drive. You can back up data on a disc, CD or an external hard drive, these have become more and more popular since they don't cause as much clutter as having a dozen discs laying around.

If you are backing up a lot of data, one should get an external hard drive, if its just a couple documents and the occasional photo a memory stick will work. I would be leery of getting a hard drive too large as if your back up drive fails thats a lot of information to loose at once. Personally I stick to a 1 GB memory stick and a 120 GB external drive. The files i use the most often are stored on the memory stick.

If you have Microsoft Windows the easiest way to find out your systems current drive size is to click on My Computer, click on that and then right click on Local Disc (C:). Slide down to Properties, click on that. This will give you the current drive size for your system. An average newer computer has a capacity of 120 GB, some have more, and some have less. You can also tell how much space has been used so far and how much is free in the same properties window. That will help in your decision on how much back up space you need. Some people put all their music or documents on their external hard drive and leave their PC's hard drive with more free space.

External hard drives are subject to heat and cold, electrical surges and physical shocks just like your desktop or laptop hard drive, so be careful and treat it like you would want it to last. If you don't want the hassle of backing up your system or you're afraid you might not do it properly, there are plenty of computer stores, or on-line companies that will gladly do it for you.

From personal experience I've learned that data loss and hard drive failure is frustrating and stressful. It takes ages to get the information all back to where you had it before. One never knows when accidents, fire or other disasters might strike.