If you are anything like me, you sometimes live in a world of blissful ignorance about the reality of your precious data and the hardware that it calls home.
But my work has once again reminded me of the vigilance needed in the way that we think about data. A colleague of mine had a hard drive crash recently and they had not backed it up to another drive (or online), so are looking at a large expense to get a data recovery expert to try to recover his precious family photos (if it is possible at all).
It is very easy to be complacent with technology. We think that our laptops, phones and computers are built to last and that our data is safe and sound on our devices. But the best way to approach technology and data is like this:
1. Your hard drive will die. It is not a matter of ‘if’, just ‘when’.
2. Never have any data that you cannot afford to lose saved on only one device – you must have redundancy on this data in preparation for a failure.
But my work has once again reminded me of the vigilance needed in the way that we think about data. A colleague of mine had a hard drive crash recently and they had not backed it up to another drive (or online), so are looking at a large expense to get a data recovery expert to try to recover his precious family photos (if it is possible at all).
It is very easy to be complacent with technology. We think that our laptops, phones and computers are built to last and that our data is safe and sound on our devices. But the best way to approach technology and data is like this:
1. Your hard drive will die. It is not a matter of ‘if’, just ‘when’.
2. Never have any data that you cannot afford to lose saved on only one device – you must have redundancy on this data in preparation for a failure.
Remembering these two simple rules allow us to change the way we see our data.
It takes some getting used to, to remember that our hardware will die. Almost as if our minds have a combination of perpetual optimism and blind faith (or is that blissful ignorance) that blocks us from expecting our beautiful, man-made techno device to ever have an issue.
But the truth is harsh. The laptop you are reading this blog on? It will die. Checking facebook on your iPhone? The phone will die too in time. In fact, the hardware we purchase and use is not built to last – it is actually ‘built to fail’. It cannot last. The hard drives in personal computers and laptops are only built to be ‘running’ for 8 hours a day 5-6 days a week, so eventually they will reach the end of their life.
Now we know this, what can we do?
We need to treat hardware (hard drives, laptops, phones, computers) as ‘transient’ items – that is, they will come and go, be used up, die and be replaced - but the data is the thing we want to keep permanently, (which generally involves transferring it from device to device as time goes by).
Next time you turn your computer off, just pretend for a moment that you can never turn it on again. Are there any pictures on there that you haven’t saved elsewhere? Any documents that you may need that are not stashed on an external hard drive? Any emails/attachments that are important that aren’t sitting on a server somewhere (say in your gmail account)?
If the answer is yes, you have some backing up to do. Good luck.
Now we know this, what can we do?
We need to treat hardware (hard drives, laptops, phones, computers) as ‘transient’ items – that is, they will come and go, be used up, die and be replaced - but the data is the thing we want to keep permanently, (which generally involves transferring it from device to device as time goes by).
Next time you turn your computer off, just pretend for a moment that you can never turn it on again. Are there any pictures on there that you haven’t saved elsewhere? Any documents that you may need that are not stashed on an external hard drive? Any emails/attachments that are important that aren’t sitting on a server somewhere (say in your gmail account)?
If the answer is yes, you have some backing up to do. Good luck.
A side note about hard drives:
Hard drives are actually very amazing devices. The best analogy for a hard drive is a record player. They both have flat, spinning disks that contain data (in one’s and zero’s), and a ‘read’ head that hovers over the disk (or platter) to read the information.
A hard drive has many platters, and the information can be read and ‘written’ by changing the magnetic state of sections of the platter. The platters rotate at blistering speeds, and the read/write heads whip around the different sections of the platter finding and saving the information.
They are relatively complex devices that have a lot of moving parts and many possible failure points. Some failure points are easier to fix than others – one of the worst being when the read/write head crashes into the platter and corrupts the data there (called a ‘head crash’). This can make data recovery impossible, even with the most advanced recovery techniques.
Generally people are flabbergasted when they have a hard drive problem.
"This has never happened before!!"
My thoughts to that (apart from sympathy for the frustration) is these people are lucky that it has only happened to them once.
