Amidst the cacophony of noises by children, sounds from loud speakers and workshops of mechanics, I was jolted from a rare evening sleep by the ringing of my phone. After exchanging pleasantries with the caller, he told me his laptop had stopped working.
He had been typing a thesis for some weeks. He used the laptop in the after of that day. Having owned the laptop for five years, it was the repository of his digital life. Each time he heard the sound from the laptop he was more distraught. You might have guess he did not back up his files.
On pressing the power button and seeing that the laptop had gone through power-on self-test (POST) but was stuck in the process of loading the operating system into memory, I concluded that the hard drive was failing. The high-pitched noise from the laptop was enough evidence to draw the conclusion. This is usually caused by the read/write head parking wrongly or because of contact between a platter and read/write head. Luckily, it was the former.
I was able to make the hard drive spin properly and this allowed me to recover his files. A hard drive in this state should not be used because it is unreliable.
Don’t let this happen to you because you may not be as lucky as this client. Backing up your files regularly can lessen the effect of hard drive failure significantly. There are many options for backing up your precious photos and documents. Some of the options include:
a. Using flash drives to back up your important files. This is very easy to do. However, flash drives are easily lost because of their small size.
b. Using optical media (CD-R, DVD-R and DVD-RAM). The storage capacity of compact discs is 700 MB while DVDs have a storage capacity of 4.7 GB. Using CD-RW and DVD-RW is not recommended because you can accidentally overwrite your files.
c. External hard drives will allow you to back up many terabytes of files. You can also use it to image your internal hard drive so that in the event of hard drive failure you can simply restore the image.
d. Store copies of your files in the cloud. Google Drive, OneDrive and others give you some storage space. Following a hard drive failure, you can access your files using any internet connected device.
Now that you know the importance of backing up your files, do it today to avert data loss.
