When my wife’s hard drive crashed on her month old computer,
it contained over a year’s worth of new born baby pictures.
When the first time mom was notified of the disaster she
first questioned if I’d be able to get the pictures back
since there were no backups being performed to her hard
drive. When she was told that the data was probably lost
(and finished crying) she then questioned, “why did the hard
drive fail?”
This seems to be the question on everyone’s mind when it
comes to a hard drive crash. Why did it crash? Determining
why the hard drive failed is often more time consuming than
simply retrieving the data. There are a plethora of reasons
for the failure, which can be summed up in two major
categories; Software failure or a physical malfunction.
Software failures are commonly caused by a corrupted table,
boot record, or when the root directory information is
missing. These types of failures are usually easy to recover
from and often the drive is not a complete loss and can
continue to be used long after the failure is repaired.
Physical malfunctions however, indicate that part of the
hard drive is physically damaged. This complicates data
recovery and typically results in drive replacement. (see
Wikipedia; Hard Disk Failure. For a more complete
explanation of Physical Malfunctions) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_failure
From Wikipedia, “hard drives are mechanical devices, they
will all eventually fail”. So the issue of hard drive
failure is not “if” your hard drive will fail, but “when”
will it fail.
The best way to deal with a Hard Drive failure is to prepare
for it ahead of time. Backups scheduled either daily,
hourly, weekly or monthly can be a time and money saver.
Regarding my wife’s hard drive; I was eventually able to
recover all her data but only after investing 80 hours of
effort. Had I chosen to use a service rather than invest my
own time, most dependable data recovery services start at
$200.00 or more just to look at the drive with no guarantee
of recovery, and the total cost of recovery can be in the
hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Having a backup strategy is the key. There are many
different strategies. One is to backup your data to the same
drive so in the event your data is accidentally deleted, you
can restore from a backup. But what if the drive is rendered
useless? Then both your active data and your backup data is
lost. So the concept is to backup to a secondary drive, such
as an external drive. This strategy doesn’t help in the
event of property loss. In the event of theft or fire for
example, both your active data and backup data can be lost.
The only real strategy is to backup to external media and
move that media to another location. To accomplish this,
Reliable PC Recommends Daily Automated Online Backups. See
our article titled, “Online Backups” to learn more.
