Hard Drive Health: How To Survive Data Loss

In the past articles of this series, we’ve talked a lot about hard drives. We’ve discussed why they’re important and what can go wrong. Developing concern for your hard drive health is one thing, but how do you go about saving your data from hard drive crashes or corruption?

Here’s a few methods you can use to make sure that your precious information is kept safe and sound.

Memory Stick Backup

The easiest method. Your PC or laptop likely has USB ports. – they’re rectangular ports where components such as mice, keyboards and game controllers usually go. One device that takes advantage of these ports is the humble flash drive, sometimes called  memory stick.

Flash Drives don’t come in sizes as big as a hard drive – the more affordable ones range rrom 16GB to 128GB, shying away from a hard drive’s standard of around 500GB – but it should be more than enough for you to store important files. Then, you can unplug the stick, keep it in a safe place, and update it with any new data you want saved. With this method, you’ll have a reliable way to keep your important data from being lost if your hard drive dies.

Automatic Cloud Uploading

You’ve probably heard the word ‘cloud’ being thrown around a lot in this day and age. Clouds are very useful for backup purposes – not only do they ensure your data is safe, but they also allow you to access said data from any computer in the world with a good internet connection.

If you have some work you want constantly backed up – a Word document, a coding project, an album of photography – look into making a Dropbox folder on your PC. A Dropbox folder automatically uploads any files placed into it to your Dropbox cloud account as a backup. Even better, if the Dropbox folder detects that your file has been changed, it will update the file it has with an updated version. This means that, should you be typing away on a Word document in the Dropbox folder and hit the save button within Word, Dropbox will detect the file being updated and upload your document to the cloud – without you having to lift a finger! Microsoft’s OneDrive will also allow you to automatically save documents from our PC to the cloud.

In part 2 of this article tomorrow, well look at more ways to prevent a catastrophic data loss.

~ Simon