Hard drives fail all the time and Your Hard Drive will Fail

These days hard drives hold a huge amount of data and are really resilient. However they do fail.Your data just lives on a rotating disk and read by a needle and is prone to lots of minor errors, which with great error correction technologies are a breeze for hard drives. However there comes a time when you use up the fault tolerance inside the hard drive and your drive becomes ticking bomb. or you drop the hard drive in transport or a part breaks inside, house catches fire, or floods. then you’ll know the very expensive pain of not having a backup on site and off site.

Send your drive off to a Hard Drive repair place? $250-$3,000 dollars or even more depending on whats wrong with it. Then youll be soon dreading you didnt have a backup.

Backup 

I recommend having a backup onsite for quick recovery and offsite (or online) for just in case the house burns down. Or if u want to save some money and hassle just have a online backup. If you have an online backup it has to be locked down and have versions so a virus just cant jump your online backup.

Testing

You can test your hard drives smart system to sometimes get a hint that its about to fail but this is not a good method. SMART is often dumb. A few good programs is Seatools and Crystal Disk Info and do a short or long test, pending how much time you have.

Bit Rot?

What the fudge is bit rot seriously. My drive getting moldy?

This is a long test normally on Hard Drive tests and it does take a long time too. However it is more thorough and may help on something called bit rot which is loosing data which hasn’t been read/write in a long time. Disk Fresh and SpinRite are good at this type of testing and redoing data.

Using Disk Fresh or Spinrite on an SSD?

You want to a read only pass of the SSD. This non destructive to an SSD. These programs will just check the integrity of the file.

Conclusion

Keep a Backup! Then nothing can hurt you. Not a virus, Ransomware (cryptolocker), house burnt down, accidental damage, tidal wave or family

Optional. Run a program like DiskFresh once a couple times a year and check with seatools afterwards.