Will my hard drive fail? (hint: yes, it will)

It's amazing how many people still don’t back up their computers. Your hard drive is likely to contain irreplaceable precious family photos, documents, music, videos and emails. Imagine them all now – gone forever. What would you lose?

Let's clear up a few things:

ALL HARD DRIVES ARE DESTINED TO FAIL.

It’s just a matter of when. Some take many years, others fail much sooner, but it WILL happen.

A backup is a DUPLICATE COPY of your data to a SEPARATE location (NOT copied to the same drive).

If you MOVE (as opposed to COPY) your files to a backup drive, they are NOT backed up! They must exist in TWO places, not just the backup drive. Otherwise if the backup drive fails you’ve lost everything.

Installing a backup is easy. You can buy a USB backup drive for about £50 and copy your files onto it, or use a backup program to copy the files for you automatically, or better still, use an online backup such as Carbonite for approx £42 per year. Carbonite constantly backs up your files over the internet automatically, so you don’t have to remember to plug in your backup drive or start a backup. Also, if you’re unfortunate enough to be a victim of fire or theft, your online backup is still safe.

Install a backup and check it often. Nothing is certain but death, taxes & hard drive failure.