Following on from my article about backing up your data, I’ve learned some important new lessons: Hard-drives can fail in many ways and each failure has varying symptoms. Sometimes the thing just fails to work at all. This can be accompanied, perhaps, by some noise from the drive itself. These symptoms are commonly caused by mechanical failure such as a...

Sooner or later, all hard drives crash. It is only a matter of when. When it happens, the degree of sweat and tears you experience is directly related to how prepared you were for it to begin with. Backing up your data is important. I even have two computers which are set up almost identically so that if the drive on one of my machines dies, I don’t lose...

As fate has it, you wake up one morning to discover your machine will not boot. “Of course this can’t happen to me, it only happens to ‘other people’.” No matter what you think, hard drive failures can happen to anyone. You. Me. The neighbor down the street. The business owner downtown. It doesn’t matter. It happens eventually. Whether your system...