| One of the most important points for any computer user to remember is to always back up your data. As much as personal computing has advanced over the past 20 years, hard drives still fail. Hard Drives are an amazing piece of mechanical engineering, as then spin (sometimes continuously) at around 120 times per second (7200 rpm). These spinning platters are spinning at such high speeds that a small interference whilst in usage can damage the disk in a certain area. There are now fail safe mechanisms in place to prevent critical failures when there is a small amount of physical damage done to the drive, but accidents do happen. |
| When some areas of the disk fail, the hard drive is effectively useless. Cases like this usually require specialists to come and recover any data that might be left. If you have made routine backups of your important data, this would be a great inconvenience to restore and install all the applications and data once more, but still recoverable. If you were unfortunate enough not have any backups (or not recent ones), then you are in trouble. Data Recovery is a very time consuming process, and often quite expensive. Fortunately, there are some data recovery procedures that you can try before having to resort to professionals. | Sometimes a hard drive can be partitioned in to several drives that appear on the computer, and in some cases a single partition from several partitions can fail on one physical drive. This means that all is most likely not lost, and it will probably be recoverable with a little work. Many people simply give up and purchase a new drive, loosing all data, when they could easily recover the data first. If your hard drive makes ill-sounding mechanical failure noises (loud clicking, rattling, scratching), then back up your data as fast as possible and buy a new hard drive. If you fail to recover the data when the drive is on the brink of no return, you will often have to pay for a specialist data recovery company to recover the data from the physically damaged drive. |
