Save Your Hard Drive

I have never had my own personal hard drive fail.  However, this past year both my roommate and girlfriend had hard drive failures.  In fact, my girlfriend’s hard drive has failed twice in the past year.  In both scenarios, every file was lost.  Pictures, school documents, and more were gone forever.  And because hard drives are not indestructible, this failure could happen to you.  Because of this everyone should prepare for this potential incident with three simple steps.

1. Back up your files regularly

If there are files that you just can’t live without, you should make sure they are backed up.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  You could buy an external hard drive and schedule daily/weekly backups.  You could also burn your files to CDs (or rewriteable CDs). 

My favorite solution, however, is online backups.  Using a program called Mozy (only available for windows currently), my computer backs up my files whenever I am idle.  It’s a free or pay service, depending on how many gigs of files you want backed up.  All you have to do is configure it once, and it becomes automated thereafter.

2. Monitor the status of your hard drive

One of the most common causes of hard drive failure is overheating.  Because of this, you should monitor the temperature of your hard drive at all times.  To do so, I recommend Notebook Hardware Control, a free download.  It sits in your system tray and displays the temperature of your hard drive and/or CPU.  It can also give you warnings when these temperatures get too high, along with many other features (including hard drive S.M.A.R.T. status).

3. Keep your computer cool and relaxed

This is mainly an issue for laptop users.  Laptops, unlike desktops, have tons of heat-producing parts crammed into a very small space.  When the laptop is working very hard, this can cause serious heat problems.  There are a few solutions to this problem.

1. Don’t overwork your laptop.  If you’re video editing, playing music, scanning your hard drive, and downloading files at once, and you notice your laptop temperature is skyrocketing, try closing a few programs to give it a break.
2. Create a breeze in your room.  Running a fan will dramatically reduce the temperature of the laptop by moving the hot air around.  If you can buy a small fan and point it at the laptop, you’ll cool it dramatically.  I keep a small fan near my laptop and turn it on whenever the temperature gets high.
3. You can also buy a notebook fan pad.  These pads hook up to a USB port of a notebook and just run fans underneath the notebook.  More expensive than option #2, but slightly more elegant.
4. Prop your laptop up on four CDs to promote more airflow underneath.
5. Use a compressed air can to spray dust out from your laptop’s insides.  [dust = heat buildup]

4. Have a recovery plan ready in case your hard drive fails

You should burn a copy of Linux to a live-CD or a USB flash drive that you can boot to if your hard drive fails and you can’t start up your computer.  I suggest Ubuntu or Puppy Linux.

This is important for two reasons.  It enables you to use your computer if it won’t start up, and it gives you a chance to access your hard drive and save important files that you might not have had the chance to back up.