I was once told by a hardware technician “It’s not IF a hard drive will fail, its WHEN”. Having already experienced a complete HDD failure some years ago and endured the pain of reinstalling applications and literally spending days rewriting documents and such, I started a strict backup schedule and adhered to it quite religiously. I was using Norton Ghost 2003 which served my purposes quite well. I was able to backup my entire HDD and restore it in its entirety should Murphy pay a visit. It even came in handy when I upgraded my hardware and needed to shift everything over in one hit.

 

After a while the backups became slower and slower, as Hard Drive Bloat overran my computer like a middle aged man tending his spare tyre with beer and pizza. Eventually I resorted to running backups overnight only to find they’d failed or I’d run out of drive space. Rather than imaging the entire machine I decided to create a quick and dirty batch file to just copy my documents folder and zip some other important files across to the backup drive. Eventually this grew in size too and I ditched the Ghost images all together. The batch backup was tedious but complacency about the stability of my HDD had crept up.

 

Surely if my HDD was going to crash I’d get a heads-up? Surely some sort of unusual pops or clicks from the machine would herald a crash? WRONG!

 

Sunday morning, late November 2008, I popped into the office to sift through some emails when I discovered that my sturdy, trustworthy old laptop had experienced a complete HDD failure. I rebooted and looked at the BIOS but to no avail… the drive had been trashed. It’s usually at this point that the “IF and WHEN” quote from my technician friend spring to mind, as well as the old favourite “Save Early, Save Often”. I hadn’t backed up my documents in 6 MONTHS! Plus, I didn’t have any ghost images to even attempt a restore.

 

Biting the bullet, I tracked down a HDD restore specialist and shipped the faulty drive off to try and get it recovered. I was facing a bill of about $2000-$2500, but there wasn’t even a guarantee that the data could be lifted off. I waited for a week in anticipation of the results.

As it turns out, Murphy is the primary shareholder in Hitachi hard drives. The technician called me back and said that when a drive crashes it usually does one of 2 things… the heads just stop working or they get stuck in write mode. Guess what? Yup… Option 2. The drive had been running nearly all night and indiscriminately writing across the drive. There was absolutely nothing recoverable and I was now faced with the painful realisation I had to do a full reinstall of my laptop and had lost 6 months worth of work. That day I went out and bought a new HDD, a massive 250GB external USB drive and the latest version of Norton Ghost (14).

 

The root of the problem is that if backups become tedious, complacency creeps in. Look for the warning signs… if your backups are becoming a chore it is very likely you’ll stop doing them as frequently (if at all). Don’t think that you’ll get warning signals and then you can act. Complete disaster can happen in an instant.

 

Remember it’s not IF but WHEN. Be prepared.