When it's gone, it's gone

Adam eluded to a trend that he has noticed about failing computers and hard drives lately. Indeed, I have seen the same epidemic. My question to you is, do you really know what the hard drive is and what its function is?

Some computer users point to the box that sits on their desk or floor and call it a hard drive. Others know that it stores data. I think few understand how important and valuable the hard drive really is and why we spend so much time writing and talking about backup. The hard drive, in desktop computers, is roughly the size of a VCR tape. It is a mechanical piece of equipment that has motors, gears and bearings...none of which is made to last forever. Thus the reason for backup.

Many of my customers have a difficult time grasping that all of their pictures, email, address book, and other important documents exist in a tenuous digital format on the hard drive. Once it fails, it often times in unrecoverable. If it is recoverable, the expense can be in the thousands of dollars.

Twice this week, I had clients ask me, well, where is my data? After explaining that the old hard drive is sitting in the box next to them and the hard drive in the computer is brand new and only contains the programs I reinstalled, I get a stare of disbelief. In many cases, I can recover some or all the data from an unresponsive hard drive. However, when an actual mechanical failure occurs, the ONLY way to get the data back is sending it a data recovery service like DriveSavers . There are no guarantees, but they can attempt to retrieve data at a premium price.

If your hard drive dies, the data drives with it. If you are working on the next great novel or have years of financial data stored on the hard drive, all that work will be lost if the only place it exists is on the failed hard drive.

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