Hard drive failure is not an unlikely occurence. A hard drive is a complex piece of hardware. Think of a hard drive as a small record player whose stylus never actually touches the surface of the record. The needle hovers 25 nanometers (the typical germ is about 1,000 nm across) above the surface, while the record spins up to 7,200 revolutions per minute. If the needle were to ever touch the surface, the record would become irreversibly damaged. This is why hard drives are a feat of engineering.
It is difficult to predict the lifespan of a hard drive. On average, a laptop hard drive will last about four years. This statistic depends on how a person uses his or her notebook. Heat is a frequent cause of hardware failure. Hard drives can generate a lot of heat due to friction when they are spinning at incredible speeds. Over time, the heat-caused expansion and contraction of the materials wear down the internal components. Hence, it is important to keep laptops well-ventilated.
This may seem counter-intuitive, but ideally a laptop should not be used on a lap (presumably yours). Laptops need airflow underneath their vents. A desk or any hard and even surface is the best place for a laptop. In addition, try not to move the laptop around too much while the hard drive indicator light is blinking. Considering the fragile nature of a hard drive: You do not want to increase the risk of a head crash (when the needle hits the disk). Now, I am not advocating anyone to use a laptop as if it was a desktop computer (because laptops, as mobile devices, are designed to withstand some abuse) but too often I see people tossing their notebooks or laptops around carelessly. Regardless of how one treats a laptop, one should always have a backup hard drive failure should occur. The whole principle behind any backup strategy is data duplication, which means that there should be at least one extra copy of the data in a separate storage location. This can be optical media (CDs, DVDs), an external hard drive or any other non-volatile medium. While it is completely possible that any of these aforementioned options can fail and result in data loss, it is unlikely that both a hard drive and its backup will fail at the same time.
There is no complete reliable backup solution. The dyes used to manufacture CD/DVD recordables and rewritables are bound to degrade over time. The data integrity on optical media may last anywhere from two to several hundred years depending on product quality and how it is stored (away from sunlight). Two very reliable brands of optical media are Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden. These two companies consistently manufacture top-quality and reliable products. On the other hand, external hard drives are not permanent solutions since they are really just encased internal hard drives. They too will fail over time. Price and size are important considerations when choosing a backup solution. CDs and DVDs are relatively inexpensive, but a CD holds about 650-700Mb of data while a single-sided DVD holds about 4.7Gb of data. For the modern computer user both CDs and DVDs offer small storage spaces. Optical storage should be used if one wants to back up critical files. It should never be used to back up an entire hard drive. This would require dozens of disks and a huge amount of waiting time.
The best backup solution lies in using an external hard drive. Currently, a 160Gb USB external hard drive costs around $80. This solution is more expensive than optical media, but it is a lot easier to maintain. Because of the capacity and speed of an external drive, an entire hard drive can be copied quickly using a USB or FireWire connection.
When the computer's hard drive fails, the "image" that resides on the external hard drive can be copied onto a new hard drive. If this transfer is done properly, a user can be up and running again in a couple of hours after a hard drive failure. This method is a lot faster and more efficient than using optical media to do an entire hard drive backup. A program like Acronis True Image ($40) or Norton Ghost ($60) can schedule and run automatic backups of a hard drive to an external storage device.
Whichever method a user chooses, it is critical that backups be updated. Weekly backups or even nightly backups are crucial because no one knows when a hard drive will fail. When it comes to backing up a hard drive, the best thing to do is to "prepare for the worst, and hope for the best."
Peter Le '10 backs up his files and you should too. To learn how to save your files from disaster, send Peter an E-mail at ple10@amherst.edu.