The Importance of a Backup

Hard Drives are a wonderful piece of Technology.  They can hold huge amounts of data and are a key component of a computer.  They are also one of the few mechanical devices in a modern PC.  A Hard Drive has a number of components to make it work, a motor to spin the platters, and a servo to control the read/write head to name the major parts.  These parts are machined with precision, but unfortunately they fail, and without warning most times....

This is where making a backup becomes extremely important.  With today's hard drive sizes, people can store a ton of family pictures, school documents, and even home videos, which can all be lost in an instant.  I've had drives last 10+ years and I've had some that last a week.  Some fail quietly and slowly, others fail with tremendous noise that makes you want duck for cover.  

The most common failure I've seen is a head crash, which is literally that.  One of the read/write heads will actually "crash" into the surface of one of the platters, this makes a very audible noise much like a coffee grinder, and assures no data will be recoverable.  The other most common failure I've seen, seems to be a calibration problem.  The PC in question will have Windows write delay errors randomly, more frequently under heavy Hard Drive access.  Eventually the PC will blue screen or fail to boot.  Sometimes the PC can limp along like this for a good amount of time, but the longer you wait, the greater your chances of data recovery will be unlikely.

With USB flash drives becoming extremely inexpensive (around $60 for a 32GB model), backups become a lot more feasible.  There are a number of software products on the market that will do automatic backups or "one touch" backups to CD or DVD media as well.  Personally I use my 32GB flash drive and copy essential stuff between multiple PCs and a network Hard Drive I have access to.  Also, utilizing the Windows "My Documents, My Pictures and My Videos" folders, organizing data is easier, and is also easier to keep updated. 

This is a very basic outline of what can be done, there are many more ways to backup and secure data.  Many of these will be touched on in later posts.  But I hope that this can deliver some insite to the mechanical Hard Drive and put an emphasis on the importance of a backup.