Prepare for Hard Drive Failure

Anyone who knows me has heard me say, "Hard drives will fail," and yet we will all be caught out eventually by a hard drive failure. The question is how much you're willing to lose when that failure eventually happens.

Hard drives, or hard disk drives, are the magnetic storage devices in your personal computer that perform long-term storage tasks. That is, anything you'd like to keep after turning the computer off. (Short-term storage is done on memory chips, which are hundreds of times faster and more expensive than hard disks, but which lose all their stored information when the computer is turned off.) All your programs and every piece of data you create and save are stored on this device. The operating system which makes your computer a computer is also stored as information on the hard drive.

But hard drives are mechanical devices, with not only a motor spinning a metal disk at thousands of revolutions per minute whenever the computer is on, but a delicate mechanism which moves a tiny magnetic "head" back and forth across a radius of the disk (remember vinyl record players? rhis is just like a tonearm), oscillating at rates which make the arm appear as a blur. It's one of the only mission-critical mechanical parts in a modern computer, and unfortunately, it's where all our stuff is (to quote George Carlin).

Internet giant Google published a paper in February 2007 to share the results of a study they did on hard drive reliability. They are certainly one of the larger users of hard drives, and the study was based on 100,000 of their drives (which may or may not represent a majority of the drives in their "server farms" - I suspect that information is "classified"). You can download a PDF file of the report here. Somewhat disturbingly, the failure rates they observed (without repsect to manufacturer) exceed 8 per cent in the second year of operation. As a household with (currently) 10 hard drives in daily use (including our TiVos, which run 24/7), that pretty much means we'll lose a hard drive every two years - and we do.

That said, I say again: hard drives will fail. Everything on your computer may go away forever.

Truthfully, you may be able to salvage the data on a hard drive after it fails. If you're lucky, the drive will act strangely enough to alarm you (i.e., the computer doesn't boot), but will work the following attempt. But it might not. There are data recovery services available - companies like Drive Savers who charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to recover data by means as elaborate as you can afford, including clean-room disassembly of hard drives and re-mounting the "platters" (which contain the data) in new drive mechanisms.

So establish a backup plan. If something you do on your computer takes effort (including just having a running computer), then it's worth effort to put the data in another place. Among the possible backup solutions:

• burn data to CD or DVD
• multiple copies, and some off-site in case of fire or theft
  
• copy data to an external hard drive
• USB or FireWire connected
• copy data to an online data service (some free, some paid)
  
• i.e., Xdrive, iBackup or Mozy
• Mac users can use a .Mac account
• this solution may be inappropriate for large amounts of data, as all data must pass over your Internet connection