Hardisk Recovery

Today I'm going to talk about hard-disk failures. More and more people are storing important data into huge hard-disks in excess of 200gb in sizes. And when the drives fail (and trust me - they eventually do fail), most people do not have backups and cry over the data-loss.

So what can we do about it? Several things:

1. Backup,backup and backup
2. Drive maintenance and monitoring


1. You can just do file backup - just backup your data into another hard-disc or DVD-R
or you can do image backup where the whole hard-disk is copied bit for bit into an image file where you can store elsewhere.

2. Drive maintenance comes in many forms
a. Defragment your files - reduces wear and tear - hence good for the drive.
b. Monitoring drive error rate and also to strengthen the magnetic signal on the drive.


So what kind of software tools we can use to get the results we want?

1. Macrium Backup <-- I'm testing the free version of this so far. Some people say Norton Ghost would do the job. I do not have a definitive answer to this yet.

2a. Windows have a built-in defragment tool, but if you want something more fancy, try out Diskeeper, OO Defrag, Perfect Disk etc

2b. SpinRite <- a friend swears by this tool, small yet effective.