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Two of our last four hard drive recoveries this year have been from people that are very familiar with computers and work in IT. Both failed to back up their own drives. One was recoverable, but due to the urgency and having to send it off to a hard drive recovery shop in SC, it cost over $2k to recover. The other happened this week and even after sending it off to the recovery company, his data was not retrievable because the actual platters were corrupt. He lost years of vital data and memories.
No one is immune from hard drive failure and data loss. If you have not backed up your important pictures, files, documents, you are asking for trouble.
Please take the time and spend a little $$ up front to back up your vital information. I can assure you that spending a little up front will pay dividends compared to the alternative.
If you do not know what to do or would like assistance, please call us and let us help. Don’t wait until your hard drive fails to spend loads of money to even TRY to recover your data. If you have a mechanical (spinning) hard drive (HDD), it isn’t a matter of IF the hard drive will fail, it’s WHEN. You are literally fighting against the clock.
And DO NOT back up your important files to the SAME hard drive your files are on. If the whole drive fails the backup will do ZERO good.
There are currently 4 main methods you can use to back up your vital data. I recommend a combination of two or more. Currently I back up files to redundant drives AND use cloud backups on Google Drive.
1. Buy an external hard drive. I HIGHLY recommend you buy an external hard drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD) instead of a mechanical drive. This may cost a little more, but SSDs do not come close to failing as often as mechanical drives. SSDs also do not have any moving parts, don’t generate heat like HDDs, and are close to noiseless. If you can’t find a SSD external hard drive let us know and we can send you a link.
2. Back up to the cloud. There are several services available, but I prefer Google Drive or Microsoft One Drive (mainly because it comes with Windows 10). Each of these has some free storage (currently 1-10GB I believe) and if you need more, you can purchase more. Even if you do not want to buy, please use to backup important files, photos, and documents. Avoid video if you can because videos take up a lot of your free space. Files and documents usually take up very little.
3. Buy a small USB drive. These drives are getting huge for their small size (beyond 2TB even) and will work very similar to the step 1 method, but won’t have the cord and annoying external device. I recommend buying something small like a 256GB San Disk Ultra Fit that is very tiny and you won’t even notice it in the back of your computer.
4. A more advanced option, that may require some assistance, would be to buy dual hard drives of the same size and speed and put them in RAID 1. This would mean all your data would be stored on 2 separate drives and if one should fail, it will give you time to replace it and then it will re-mirror to the new drive when you get it installed. Of course, there is still a chance that both drives will fail at the same time (think direct lighting strike), but the chances are greatly reduced.
There is a link below to Microsoft about how to back up files and create recovery disks.
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If you have any questions or if we can help you through any of this, please don’t hesitate to call or email us!
Thanks!
Jason Bathon
Owner, JAB IT PC
785-577-1659
www.jabitpc.com
www.facebook.com/jabitpc
2035 E Iron Ave Ste 231
Salina KS 67401
Veteran Owned and Local!
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