How would you feel if you turned on your Windows laptop and saw a screen with the line "No Hard Disk Driver Detected"? Or if you started your Macintosh and saw a screen with a flashing question mark, meaning the computer can't find the hard drive?Either screen means your hard drive has crashed and, more than likely, all of your files are gone - your documents, e-mail, photos, music.
Next question: do you have a backup? No? Hard drives aren't supposed to break, right? Well, not ideally.
The potential life of a hard drive is rated by what's called Mean Time Between Failure, or MTBF. Modern drives have a MTBF of 500,000 hours or more, which works out to around 57 years of around-the-clock use. That figure, however, is misleading because it's calculated by running hundreds of hard drives side by side for a few months, not from testing drives for the full 500,000 hours.
I've got drives that are 10 years old and still working, but in general, the older a drive the greater the risk of a crash. Even new drives a few months old will crash; sometimes a whole batch from a manufacturer will be defective.
There are several options available for backing up your files.
Flash drives are a good choice for backups - they're small and fast. Pocket size USB hard drives work, too. Don't consider floppy disks, unless your computer doesn't have a USB port; floppies are less reliable than any other type of disk. You also can easily burn a CD or DVD of your files, and CD-RWs and DVD-RWs can be reused.
Another option is to "clone," or completely copy, your hard drive to an external drive, but that will take a large external disk and might not be worth the time and money if you have all of your original software disks.
On Windows computers, you can manually back up files in the My Documents, Shared Documents, My Music and My Pictures folders. Check the size of the folders before you copy, then decide on a CD, DVD or external drive with enough capacity to hold everything.
You might want to try Windows XP Professional's built-in backup utility. It's in Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Backup. Read the full instructions from Microsoft at http://www.tinyurl.com/3lvzn. For Windows XP Home, you'll need to install Backup using the instructions on the Web site listed above.
Windows Vista also allows full-disk and scheduled backups, depending on your version. Other backup software packages for Windows reviewed by PCWorld can be found at http://www.tinyurl.com/yrtkdn.
For Macs, you can back up manually, too. Your files are in the Users directory on the top level of the hard drive, in the folder with the same name as your log-in. Your user folder will be too big to put on a flash drive, but if you just want your Documents folder, it can be copied from there. Your Music and Movie folders are in the same place; e-mail is in your Mail folder inside the Library folder.
For full-disk backup, try SuperDuper (www.shirt-pocket.com) or CarbonCopyCloner (http://www.bombich.com). They both clone your hard drive to an external drive. With a newer Mac, you can clone your drive and then, if needed, start up from that drive and completely restore your system and all your files to a new internal drive.
The new version of OS X - called Leopard - is due out in a few weeks, and a feature called Time Machine will copy everything on your Mac at regular intervals, allowing you to go back in time to recover files.
Another option is a .Mac subscription ($99 a year, www.apple.com/dotmac). With that, you receive 10 gigabytes of backup space on the .Mac server, along with other .Mac services, such as Web hosting, file syncing and sharing. Search the Internet to find other online backup services for Windows and Mac.
Which brings up my next point: If you're going to back up your files, they are only as safe as the location of the back up media. You can put a flash drive in the glove box of your car or a hard drive in the bottom drawer of your desk, but it might not be available when you need it. Online backup services can be fairly inexpensive and they will keep your data safely off site but still accessible.
Another point to consider is encrypting your data if your backup will be accessible to others. Check the links above; some software applications offer encryption for backups, as do online backup services.
Keep the instructions for your backup software or online service printed out, because you'll want them on hand - and not on the hard drive - in the event of a crash.
If your work is really valuable, do a hard drive backup and an online backup.
If the worst happens - your drive crashes and you don't have a backup - search the Internet for data recovery businesses. Irreplaceable files can be recovered depending on the severity of the crash and (ouch) how much money you can afford.
Don't wait until your hard drive crashes; your digital life can disappear. A good backup will allow you to restore your files and get back in business.
Next week: You wanted concert tickets and didn't get them? How the "bots" get the tickets you wanted.
Mark Ratledge is a Missoula computer consultant. He can be reached through http://www.songdogtech.net
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