Click Click Clicky

Some of you will cringe at the mention of those words.  Some of you have had the good fortune to never have had experienced it yet.  And I emphasize ‘yet’.

For those who haven’t run into this before, click click clicky is what we at UNI call a hard drive failing.  Inside the drive there is a little arm and spinning disc, not unlike a record player, and when that arm starts banging all over the place and going crazy, it usually makes a click noise, which means you can usually kiss all of your data good-bye.

For any hard drive out there, it’s merely a matter of time before it goes south and ‘gives up the ghost’.  Some drives will last a week, some will last 2 years, some will last 10 years, and there’s no way to be absolutely sure when yours will have its last happy day.  Yours could be next, right as you are reading this article.

Let me bring you back from the brink though, and inform you that you have a multitude of options available to you to help keep this from ever seriously affecting you:

1. Have a good, solid backup plan. This can be quite a broad topic, but the basic components for the home user would be to keep super important files in more than one place.  Like on your computer AND your laptop, or on a couple different flash drives (use more than one, as they can fail without warning), or on a couple different external hard drives. (once again, more than one!)  Or all of the above.  Keep multiple older versions of files if you ever think you made need to ‘go back in time’ to an earlier revision of a paper or lawyer document.  Keep in mind that if you are a professional user that has a RAID array in their desktop that this does not count as a backup.

2. Invest in a solution to ‘image’ your computer. This is an amazing technology that has been around for awhile, but has only recently become popular.  It basically means that you take an entire point-in-time copy of your hard drive and save it to another location.  This way, if your hard drive crashes, you simply install a new one, boot up off of your image software recovery CD, and restore the image of your system, and viola! everything is back just like it never happened!  No reinstalling Windows, no reinstalling all of your software, no setting up your email application again, no setting up your iTunes again (shudder!).  The best thing is, if you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, this technology is built in and you have no other software to buy!  All you need is an external hard drive or an extra internal hard drive to save system images too.  If you are still running Windows XP, don’t fret!  UNI has a software application we sell that works great with Windows XP.  Even if you have Windows Server, we have options for imaging that don’t cost any more than it does to image a desktop computer!

3. Replace your hard drive before the warranty expires. This one can be hard for some people to swallow, as they think ‘why should I replace it if it isn’t broken yet.’  The best analogy I can think of is the timing belt on your car.  It’s a belt hidden in the engine that makes sure critical pieces work together.  If the belt breaks, it can cause $1000′s of dollars of repairs in an instant.  No warning, just driving along and then BANG! you’re coasting to a stop with a dead car.  This is why manufacturers have a specified time frame for when you are supposed to replace the belt.  Going longer is like playing Russian Roulette with your car’s engine.  No one wants that!

Your hard drive is the same way, and if you put your self on a schedule to replace the drive every 2-3 years max, you will avoid most drive failures from ever happening.  This is what I have done personally for the past 12 years, and I have never had a drive fail on me, not once!  Most hard drives out there have a 3 year warranty.  (All of the internal drives UNI sells have a 3 year warranty, some even have a 5 year)  So while you won’t be out any cash to get a new drive if yours dies during the warranty, is the risk of losing all of your data really worth it?  Also, it is much easier for a technician to copy the contents of an older working drive to a brand new drive than it is to try to resurrect data off of a  drive that has crashed!  By the way, beware of hard drives you buy from big box stores that are in pretty retail box packaging.  Most of the time these drives only carry a 1 year warranty! All of the hard drives sold by UNI, regardless of whether they are retail box or OEM packaging carry at least a 3 year warranty.

4. If you have a laptop, treat it with care! I’ve seen so many laptops that have had hard drives fail prematurely most likely because they were not handled correctly.  When hard drives aren’t powered on, they can take quite a bit of abuse without failing, but when they are actually running, the tolerance goes way down.  Being careful with your laptop will not only preserve its overall life (and keep the outer case looking nice) but it will go a long towards extending the life of the hard drive inside.

The path to data happiness lies in being prepared for things to fail.  Computers are not ‘fire and forget.’  Just like a car, they need maintenance, and just like a car, an ounce of prevention now is worth several pounds of cure later on.  Keep this in mind and you will have many less issues with your computer.  And as always, UNI is there to help all of it make sense and make sure that you have the right backup plan for your needs.