When your Hard Drive crashes.

It’s really quite scary how dependant one becomes on the computer, and it is not until it turns up its toes and goes to cyber-heaven (or should that be hell?) that the dependency really hits home.

About a year ago I read an article by David Pogue of the New York Times and he made it clear that it was not so much a case of IF your hard drive crashes, but WHEN. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. The sobering fact is that although the computer is basically a solid-state box of electronic circuitry, it’s weakest link is a device which relies on moving mechanical parts, i.e., the hard disk drive.

If your computer dies or is seriously past its use-by date, take it to bits, then apply a small screwdriver to the hard disk drive cover and you’ll find inside a little pile of shiny discs with a small gap between each, all spinning on a common spindle. So there’s one set of moving parts for you. Then there’s a set of arms pivoting near the perimeter of the discs, resembling nothing so much as a group of gramophone record pick-up arms (for those of you who can remember such things!) that swing backwards and forward across the surface of the discs a hair’s breadth from the surface. The potential for wear and tear and physical damage to the surface of the discs is clear to see.

As a result of reading that article I made the decision to purchase an external hard drive and I kept all my important files backed up to it. The final demise of my 6-year old computer the other week caused high levels of stress, but the existence of my external hard drive at least reduced the likelihood of a complete nervous breakdown!

Getting the new machine up and running was not all sweetness and light, however, since I was switching from Windows 98 to Windows XP, and I found that my accounts program – which happily runs on either of the operating systems – was unable to open any of my accounts files that it had created and saved whilst running in Windows 98 mode. It was quite happy to start creating new files for me in Windows XP but now I was faced with the loss of six years personal financial data, and I had to go through the painstaking process of setting up all my accounts again, and accessing the various current and savings accounts (fortunately available online) to get some balances to start the new files with.

The other little glitch was the loss of all my incoming and outgoing e-mails, and the e-mail address book from my e-mail client program. These are not easy to locate and backup and I had forgotten that programs like Outlook Express and Thunderbird (I use the latter) have an “Export” function that you can use to export all this data to a text file. I recovered some of my addresses by going to my BT web mail, but it had not been kept so up-to-date.

So – if you don’t want to lose your window on the world, your financial documents, your precious writing, your spreadsheets and databases, and your sanity, learn the lesson the easy way, not the hard way: make regular backups to CD-ROM disks or to an external hard drive. Don’t forget … it’s not IF but WHEN your hard drive crashes. Don’t come crying to me when it happens!

A final thought: there have been stories of data recovered from discarded computers turning up in Africa and providing access to online bank accounts. You might like to follow my lead here ... remove the hard drive and take a sledgehammer to it!