Report by Larry Maland Feb 4, 2004            

Imagine your hard drive stopped working.

One day you try to turn on your pc and you get a message saying

  HARD DISK FAILURE 

You think of the pictures you have on your hard drive. You think of your email address book and documents, files, emails and downloaded games and maybe even music that you had intended to backup.

Your heart sinks.  You call places and everyone tells you the same bad news.  One option is to pay in the neighborhood of $500 to $1000 to see if someone can recover anything. 

It is time to back up your most important files.  If you do not know how to back up files, please call us and we will come give you a lesson on how to save your files with your system. 

There are some interesting facts to note about saving files to “External Media”.  By “external media” I mean floppy disks, CD’s, DVD’s, zip disks, or a removable hard drive.

These media are different: some are magnetic and some are optical. The magnetic ones are the floppy disks and hard drives, which have been in use for a couple of decades or more.  The data stored on these drives can last over a decade if they do not deteriorate or get hit with some magnetic fields. 

Optical technology is newer. There is a wide variety of CDR and CD-RW and DVD and DVD-RW disks on the market.  Some are reported to start losing data integrity at only 20 months.  Some claim that the data on their brand or on the higher quality products will last 10 years.  Since they have only been around a few months, it is a bit risky.

There is a new CD quality standard referred to as Orange Book Part II, v3.1, which I have not yet researched.  But it may well pay to buy the highest quality blank CD’s you can, rather than the cheapest around.

When it comes to the 10 year observation on magnetic media, I refer to floppy disks. Modern hard drives do not last that long.  They have moving parts and they are subject to mechanical failure and or electrical failure. 

The standard warranty on hard drives used to be 3 years when they were 1 to 10 Gigabytes.  Now they are 40, 80 and even 160GB.  The warranty is now only 1 year on most drives.  For a few dollars more, you can buy a better drive with a 3 year warranty.

Back up your pictures and your other files, as soon as possible. I know of two families who recently lost all their digital photos of their babies when their hard drives died.

When a hard drive fails, all the programs are gone, too.  You can reinstall them but anything you have downloaded is gone, as well as your windows settings and on and on and on… One solution is a backup hard drive which is a complete duplicate.  If your hard drive fails, you have a hard drive to boot from that will be a clone of the dead one, and you won’t know the difference.  It is the best backup solution, especially for a small business.

For permanent storage, since floppy disks and zip disks are limited in capacity, and CD’s may not last as long as we will, we have one other solution.  You can use an online backup service.  They backup your files, and backup their backups.  They rotate the media and verify the integrity of the files they save. They do a professional job and unless they are destroyed by nuclear weapons, your files should be safe for decades.  Of course, everything comes with a price.

Learn how to backup your files and do it soon. You will be glad you did.