It will never happen to me!  That is what we always hear from our clients.  The dreaded “hard-drive failure” does indeed happen quite often and when you least expect it.  Careful planning and good maintenance practices is a must for every computer system to help circumvent such a catastrophe.  If you boot up your computer system and and you receive an error message stating that your “operating system is not found” or you receive a “data read error” on your monitor, you may very weill have a failing hard drive.  Another common sign of a failing hard drive is if you hear clicking noises originating from the drive itself.  Still another common symptom of a failing hard drive is when you get a blue screen suddenly appear on your screen with an error message.  All these signs should  be of great concern and careful planning ahead can alleviate the headaches associated with failing hard drives.

There are various computer data backup software programs available on the market to help you backup your important files. Most will allow you to create backups on CD’s, DVD’s, external hard drive, or even a USB thumb/ flash drive .  Norton Ghost is a backup program you could use or True Image by Acronis. The latter is the one we use at our offices and highly recommend. We like it the most and it is very reliable.  It runs on all current windows operating systems and with this program you have the ability to to make an exact duplicate or “image” of your entire partition or you can do scheduled or inremental backups of single or groups of files. The entire partition can then be restored or individual files can be restored at a later date if needed.

When you suspect a hard drive failure or crash has occurred its always best to immediately have the hard drive diagnosed by a trained certified computer technician.  Sometimes if caught early enough, you can get most or all of your data saved off the drive before any further damage.  Its always best to first try a local computer repair shop to try and retrieve your hard drive data as there are also data recovery companies that may be able to retrieve your data from expired hard drives but they typically will charge much higher fees.

So please make sure you give backing up your important files strong consideration. It does not take long to set up a backup program and believe me it will save you a lot of heartaches and headaches if your hard drive crashes or goes out on you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Computer Bytes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.