As always, this is yet another superb article by Leo.
I've been troubled by seeing many of the reviews for hard drives at the Web sites for major online retailers; too many of the drives seem to be arriving DOA or dying early deaths. This DOA and high failure rate is frightening.
The declining dependability of a component as vital as your hard drive makes me anxious to make the transition to "cloud computing." Hopefully the companies that host such professionally-run online storage sites have sophisticated redundancies built into their systems, thereby increasing the survivability of their customers' precious data.
On a related note, I DO backup and have been doing so since purchasing my first PC back in the early '90s. In all these years, I've had just two or three hard drives die suddenly and without warning. In each case, though, the loss of data was virtually nil and quite tolerable thanks to my habit of backing up my drives.
I'm the first to admit that backing up is more boring than watching grass grow ... Really! I say this because as you're sitting at your computer, you have the subconscious expectation of getting some tasks accomplished and getting them done quickly. After all, that's what computers are supposed to be about. But if your backup strategy involves any waiting, this feels like the antithesis of what you sit down to use your computer for.
And the temptation to ignore or procrastinate doing my backups is ever-present ... But only until I remember how comforted I was after replacing a dead hard drive and being able to move on without any major data loss.
In sharp contrast to my personal practice of backing up, I'm immediately reminded of the U.S. Defense agency where I last worked. The whole agency is filled with thousands of IT "professionals," yet they have a sense of immunity from data loss, it seems, or they just don't care. Few ... VERY few of my colleagues used an external hard drive as I did to perform backups.
How about network-based storage? Yes, there was also network-based storage available, but this was supposed to be ONLY for data you needed to share; use of the servers for backups was aggressively discouraged by the network admins. In effect, since there was no stated policy, guidance, advice, or support regarding data-preservation strategies, major data losses were experienced every single day! With over 6,000 personnel, and with each of them having at least one computer on his desk — not to mention the massive gymnasium-sized computer lab with rack after rack of hard disk arrays — you can be sure that a hard drive was failing somewhere in the agency all the time.
I digress, though. Listen to Leo ... If you care about it, BACK IT UP, period!!!
Thank you, Leo, for your continued devotion to helping your fellow computer users.
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A comment on: How long should a hard drive last?
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03-Jun-2011