Make sure you backup your hard drives!

“It’ll never happen! Hard drive’s are so reliable these days!“. Yes, even I’ve said this. Probably because I felt that my IBM laptop (provided by my company) was an indestructable piece of technology and that everything inside it is nicely cocooned in its robust shell. Well, it’s stronger than my personal HP nx7010 which makes strange creaking noises if you pick it up with one hand!

Anyway, when I returned to the office on a Monday morning after my little vacation, my trusted so called robust IBM (Lenovo) was struggling to sustain any Windows session for longer than 15 minutes. A good friend of mine who works in the group that looks after these little things came over and checked my Event Viewer. (Why didn’t I think of that?) Lo and behold, lots of red icons. My Hard Drive had lots of bad blocks. So there goes my Outlook PST file (which I hadn’t copied to the network in months).

I was lucky that I managed to recover everything using the CHKDSK utility. I simply left CHKDSK /r running all night. This managed to correct many index entries in the file system and also tries to recover things that had somehow become hidden. Once this was done, I copied everything to the network immediately and handed over my laptop to my colleague.

My point is, its easy to become complacent with hard drives. The hard drive is probably the most busiest component in any computer and since it is constantly moving, things are bound to go wrong.

Now everything has been sorted, I focused on my poor HP nx7010 (which is actually a really good machine in my opinion). My backup system at home isn’t too sophisticated. I use Acronis TrueImage which allows me to backup folders, partitions or the whole drive. The version that I use (which is now old) can write directly to a local folder (on another partition or drive), a shared folder on a network or directly to one or many CDs. My IBM (Lenovo) has this nice little utility that sits in the system tray and monitors the tilt of your laptop and puts any read/write activity on hold until the drive has stabilised. I tried looking for something similar for my personal laptop, but couldn’t find anything like it. What I did find was a utility that monitors temperature and the general health of your drive. It’s called HDD Life Pro and is available to try for 15 days before you buy. I think this is something I will buy!