documents, working on your finances, updating your family's website or
conducting your home or online business.
Suddenly, strange errors start appearing, your computer makes loud
scratching sounds and then, nothing.
A hard drive crash can mean much more than the loss of a part of your
computer. Often this is the primary place for storage of your
information, family photos, work related files, favorite mp3s and
other things that have often taken months if not years to make.
The loss of an operating system like Windows is not as serious, you
have the disk already, all your programs are on CD, but your personal
information needs to be protected by you.
What steps need to be taken to make sure that such a loss does not occur?
The actual idea of data protection is not new, but still many people
only face it's reality when it's too late.
The most essential basic steps are as follows:
- Virus protection software
- Personal firewall if you use the internet
- Save personal files to CD or DVD
Virus protection and firewall software will protect you from attacks
that can destroy software and your files. Saving files to another
place makes sure there is a permanent record of all those things you
need. The more frequent you save elsewhere the less you will lose in
case of disaster.
All of the above protect you from loss of software due to some
programming, but other things can cause data loss too.
The other things are hardware related, meaning that the actual place
the files are stored is damaged or destroyed.
Some things that could cause hardware failure or loss are
- Lightning strike
- Theft
- Hard drive failure
Lightning is very hard to protect from. The very fact that it is such
a powerful force means that the most basic of lightning protectors
could not protect from a direct strike. True protection for this costs
a lot and is very often not preventable. If you live in a region with
frequent strikes, take greater care in backing up frequently to a
somewhere and perhaps even moving that informatino to another site.
Theft happens from time to time, once your computer is gone, there is
not too much hope of getting it back.
Hard drive failures are when the drive itself fails due to some
internal problems or any of the preceding physically harmful events.
All of these are quite horrible but what can be done to prevent it.
Backups have been and will continue to be the best way. If you have a
copy of something in two places there is always another one if worst
comes to worst.
Another option that is becoming more and more sensible and
cost-effective is a RAID hard drive array. This basically means that
two hard drives work together as a pair, mirroring the data, each
being and exact copy of the other one. So if one fails, the other one
takes over and the defective one can be replaced.
And finally, if you do face the loss of a hard drive, there are data
recovery experts. For a fairly large fee they will open your hard
drive and try to recover what was on it. Never attempt to open and fix
yourself as the inside of the hard drive is a contaminent free space,
with zero dust, even a few particles can make the drive unrepairable.
So make sure you're not the next one to get an unpleasant surprise and
make sure that you are well protected from the loss of your all
important information.
Peter Stewart is a computer enthusiast, his interest in computers and
focus on practical down to earth advice inspired his two websites.
- Practical buying tips
- Fair and honest reviews and opinions
