Fact Sheet (Aug 2007): Hard Drive Failures
Fact Sheets
Friday, 17 August 2007
PDF version

Here is some food for thought.  Computer data has become an indispensable part of today's organizations.  How many years has your organization spent gathering and compiling the data that resides on your computers?  How important is that data to the organization?  What would happen to your organization if that data suddenly disappeared, or was compromised in some way?  Could your organization face legal issues if the data was lost or corrupted?

All of the data on your organization's computers is stored on devices called hard drives.  All hard drives will eventually fail.  Some fail after years of reliable service, while others (less commonly) fail after only a few months of use.  Some will exhibit signs of degradation before failing, while others will fail without warning.  After a hard drive has failed, recovering the data from the hard drive is usually a difficult (if not impossible), time-consuming, and expensive process.

Not only do hard drive failures threaten your organization's data.  Computer viruses, accidental deletions, and power fluctuations can also threaten the integrity and survivability of your data.

How can your organization guard against and recover from these inevitable realities?  By implementing a system that unobtrusively makes a backup copy of your computer data on a periodic basis, and allows you to retrieve that data as needed. 

Many different data protection and backup schemes exist (such as simple file backups, RAID arrays, and redundant storage area networks).  Likewise, different types of backup media exist (such as magnetic tapes, floppy disks, Zip disks, recordable CDs, external hard drives, and USB “thumb drives”).  Which methods and media work best?  It depends on a number of factors, such as how much data needs backed up, how often it needs backed up, and how long the data needs to be kept.

The next Fact Sheet will explore in more detail simple data protection schemes that should be implemented on every computer in your organization.  If you would like to discuss ideas on how to protect your organization's data, please contact VisTech IT Solutions, LLC at 440-281-4498 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Thank you for reading!