Backup your data

One "not so fine" morning, my external hard drive decided not to function anymore. I tried few times to only see some constant error messages popping up. It was a 1.5 terabyte hard disc that I use for official purposes. My data are so huge that I need those high capacity hard drives to store them.

Luckily, I had all the important files backed up in another disc and thus avoided a catastrophe. There are a few things I learned when I discussed with others about trying to retrieve the data from the failed hard disc.

1. Normally, all these hard drives are encrypted to ensure protection of saved data. In case of some failure, this makes the process of retrieving the data from the hard drive very difficult.

2. The companies that sell these hard drives normally don't offer the service to retrieve the data. When I contacted them through mail, after few messages back and forth, describing the details and the current condition of the hard drive, they only offered to replace the hard drive.

3. But, there are some other sources which can be contacted to retrieve the data from the corrupted hard disc. Once we send the hard disc to them, they will check its condition and will ask if you would like to open the disc and retrieve the data. In some cases, even this process may not be possible, which means the data can never be retrieved. As the process of opening the hard disc will be done in clean-room environments, and requires sophisticated procedures, the cost to do this will be very high. It depends on the amount of data that is inside the drive. It will easily cost around US$ 1000 or more to retrieve data of say 1 tera byte.

4. When they retrieve the data, it will not be as it was saved (in folders and sub-folders). So, if one had a lot of data in the hard drive, it may need a herculean effort to put them back in order.

So, backing up the data will save a lot of time and money, and of course avoid a lot of tension.

Some tips I learnt when backing up the data:

1. Have more than one back-up. Don't have all the back-ups left in the same place as some fire accident or any such issues will make all the data lost.

2. Good way is to have the data backed up in a computer and also another copy in a hard disc. In this way, the computer back up can be used to retrieve in case of the hard drive failure and the hard drive back up used if the computer hard disc fails or other accidents happen. The hard disc can be stored in a safe place and can be used when necessary.

3. Even more safer options are to have something like an apple time machine or some similar back-up devices installed in the work place. This will be very helpful to have the data backed up easily from time to time.

4. Back up the data frequently. This can be once a week or longer, depends on the user.

Even large capacity hard discs (~1 tera byte) cost around US$ 100. This is just 1/10th or even less price compared to the money one may need to spend to retrieve the data from a corrupted hard drive.

So go ahead and back-up your data immediately :)