Benefits Of A Hard Disk Crash

Posted by Tom Colvin

May 26, 2008

Yes, there actually can be benefits from a hard disk failure.

As readers will know, I’ve been struggling for 3 weeks with a troubled hard disk. Fortunately, I detected early signs of the problem, and I have survived. But it has still been a huge problem — and I have learned a lot.

Writers are, of course, particularly7 vulnerable. I have two really major deadlines facing me. All of my research for the academic-like papers are stashed away on my hard disk, as are the early stages of my drafts. It’s been for me the worst possible time for a hard disk crash.

I thought I had a good backup routine in place. Daily automatic backups to two different online repositories, using highly acclaimed Mozy and Carbonite. In addition, I have some manual backups to an external hard drive. And I even occasionally back up to DVD disk.

The routine had some holes in it, I discovered.

First, I lost 7 months of recent data from my Personal Information Manager. I was shocked! And I learned LESSON NUMBER ONE: during the early stages of a disk failure, the drive begins to develop “bad clusters.” That’s where data is stored. Sadly, my PIM data apparently was tucked away in one of those bad sectors. [Happily, though, I caught the disk problem before too many clusters had failed. And the other bad clusters, I discovered, contained non-essential material, mostly easily replaceable program files.]

Ah, but my backups would save me, I thought. Then I discovered that my automatic backup routine simply overwrote a good data file with a corrupted one. I even, in a desperate lapse of reason, made the mistake of manually backing up the bad data onto my external hard drive, once again overwriting good data with bad. And finally, I realized that my last backup to DVD disk was 7 months ago. I had no idea I’d let that much time pass.

MAJOR LESSON FOR TODAY: When first installing and evaluating software, take the time to read the help section about backing up a program’s data. Look particularly for the facility of keeping multiple, dated backups. I learned, too late, that EssentialPIM in fact offers just that facility. If I had activated it, I would have had several recent backups, all done automatically — and only the most recent backups would have been bad. If one has a choice, choose a program with strong back up options over one with limited capability.

ANOTHER LESSON: Backups onto DVD or CD disks are indeed essential, even when one has other automatic backup routines in place. Most experts seem to recommend monthly backups to disk. I now agree.

More lessons coming…

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