What happens when your hard drive calls it quits and what you can do to prevent the loss of cherished memories and files.
Short on time? Skip to the end for the recap.
All too many times I have had new clients come to me with a failed hard drive. The story is always the same. They have all the photos of their children on the computer from the last seven years and are looking for any way to get the photos back. There are times that we have been able to painlessly restore the data at low cost. There are also times that make me really feel for them when they need to spend thousands of dollars to get the data recovered by specialists, or worse, the data is lost forever.
We are often willing to spend our hard-earned cash on purchasing a decent desktop or laptop computer, however, the need for a backup strategy is often overlooked. When storage devices fail, the cost for data recovery can be expensive and is not guaranteed to be successful. Here are some reasons why it is important to back up your data along with some options you have for storage.
Mechanical Hard Drives
When a hard drive fails there can be many challenges in how data can be recovered. In mechanical hard drives, data is stored on magnetic spinning platters and data is arranged in a specific way, depending on the hard drive’s model. Most of the time, if a mechanical hard drive can receive power and is still accessible, it means your data can be recovered and transferred within a modest amount of time. This is something our company, Unhinged Systems, does regularly. However, if your hard drive is not accessible, you will need the help of a more advanced data recovery technician.
When you bring your hard drive to these specialized technicians, they need to find the exact make, model, and revision of your hard drive to swap the components in a state-of-the-art clean room to try to recover the data. This can make data recovery an awfully expensive endeavor and is not always successful.
All this time, money and stress can be avoided if you have a reliable back-up strategy in place, which we will get to. But first, let us talk about solid state hard drives.
Solid State Hard Drives
Modern hard drives have been transitioning to solid state memory which stores data onto non-volatile memory. Which means, instead of the data being stored magnetically and being mechanically stored and retrieved, the data is stored electrically. Bits of data are stored in storage cells and those cells degrade over time as more data is written and overwritten to them. Solid state drives have enabled a massive increase in performance but at the cost of being much more challenging for data recovery. If the controller on an solid state drives fails, the data cannot be read through normal means. All the storage cells on the drive are soldered in, making it much more difficult for recovery technicians to retrieve data.
Options for Protecting Your Data
Protecting those precious family photos and irreplaceable documents is of utmost importance. The absolute best way to ensure that your data remains safe is to have a solid backup strategy. Here are some of the products that you can employ to keep your data from being lost.
Physical External Backups
External backups are the first line of defense in protecting your data. An external USB hard drive should be purchased and used to make duplicates of the data already on your PC. Many backup hard drives on the market come pre-loaded with backup and recovery software to make setting up a backup plan easier.
The features that come with basic backup software differ from product to product, but the concept remains the same, backup the data on your PC to an external device. Advanced backup and recovery software can be purchased separately and typically offers a much more robust range of features designed to make recovery easier and backup schedules more optimized.
Cloud Backups
Most people are familiar with the iCloud, or Google cloud storage for their smart phones. These services make backups of the photos you take, apps you download, and files you create to synchronize them between devices and to ensure that recovery is possible if the device is lost, stolen or destroyed. When using a cloud backup service, you are sharing your files with a company (for example, Apple or Google) who stores your information and data in a massive server warehouse. Most devices come with some free storage, but that can fill up quickly requiring you to pay a monthly or annual premium for expanded storage.
Cloud backups are also available on PC. The more advanced backup and recovery software products typically offer cloud backup services with storage amounts offered at different price points depending on your needs. Cloud backups for your PC will ensure that if you run into a catastrophic failure where your computer hardware and external backup drive are inaccessible you still have an off-site backup to recover your data.. Having your data backed up to a cloud can be a life-saver when dealing with house fires, flooding, and other environmental factors.
Cloud backups can and should be configured to be password protected and encrypted so that your sensitive data cannot be stolen. The chances of a cloud provider compromising your data is exceptionally low, however, if you use encryption and password protection your data cannot be easily accessed or copied.
What Should You Do?
The bare minimum that we recommend is to get an external USB hard drive and some backup software. Set up an incremental backup that keeps historical data and changes on a weekly basis so that you can recover files and their previous versions several months back. If you want added security that your data won’t be lost, then we recommend selecting a cloud backup provider and storing your most precious data on the cloud so that it will be available should the need arise.
If you find yourself in a position where you need to recover your data, that is a service we offer. If the storage device is still accessible, we can remove the device and duplicate it for you onto a USB drive. If the device is not accessible, we can recommend reputable data recovery companies that have clean rooms and skilled recovery technicians.
If you would like to speak to us about setting up a backup strategy that is right for you, we are here to help!
TL;DR Recap
Having a backup strategy in place is important to protect your priceless memories and important documents.
Not having a backup strategy could be expensive, requiring highly skilled technicians to recover your data which is not always guaranteed to be successful.
You have two great options for a backup strategy – a physical, external hard drive or a cloud service.
If you need help recovering your data or setting up a backup strategy – we can help! Get in touch at hello@getunhinged.ca
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