I’ve lost track of the number of times I have heard that impassioned plea after informing a student that their data is gone due to a hard drive failure. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough of a reason to convince their hard drive to give up the goods. Most people don’t think about backing up their data until after their system has crashed. To quote Larry the Cable Guy, “that’s like checkin’ on your burgers after they’re burnt!”
A hard drive’s lifespan is rated in hours of use, known as its Mean Time Between Failure. The average consumer-grade hard drive claims to have a MTBF of 500,000 hours, which works out to about 57 years. If only this was actually true—the average lifespan of a hard drive seems to be 5-6 years, and the older the drive gets, the higher the chance that it can suddenly fail.
I can remember a time when hard drives would easily last 10 years or more under normal use. Now it seems like they last maybe half that. I see a lot of repairs with hard drives that failed less than 4 years after purchase. Meanwhile, I have a pile of hard drives at home that were in use for almost 15 years before they were retired because they were no longer large enough. They still work, but there’s not much use for a 300MB hard drive anymore.
Twenty years ago, it wasn’t unusual to pay in excess of $9000 for a desktop computer. Computers were a major investment. You could take comfort in knowing that you were getting your money’s worth because back then, the parts were built to last.
Technology didn’t progress as quickly in the early ’90s, so there was no reason for people to buy a new computer every few years. Now things change so quickly that it’s become “upgrade or die.” When you pay as much for a computer as you do for a used car, it’s an easy decision when it breaks—it’s much cheaper to repair it than replace it. Today’s computers are comparatively cheap, so depending on what component fails, it can be a tougher choice. The tendency to replace a computer is much higher than it once was, so there’s not a lot of incentive for manufacturers to spend the extra money to build components that last forever.
So, knowing that your computer has a hard drive that you KNOW is going to fail within 5-10 years, do I even need to say the magic word?
Occasionally, you can tell that your hard drive is starting to fail. In many cases though, you don’t have any warning. You turn on your computer and it won’t boot. Your laptop gets dropped while it’s on, causing immediate and irreparable damage to the hard drive. Whatever the cause, this is often the only time people consider their data. They bring their system to us, asking us to try to save their data, and in a lot of cases we have to be the bearers of bad news. Everything that was on that system, whether it’s term papers or baby pictures, is gone. Threatening it, crying about it, saying things like “but I have a term paper due next week!” simply don’t help.
I’ve said it many times in past articles, and I will continue to say it: back up your data. If you don’t have an external backup of some form, make one. Since OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple has included a built-in free backup program called Time Machine, yet many people don’t use it or even know what it is. I hear things like “a hard drive costs too much” or “I don’t have time.” Now try to figure out how much time and/or money you’re going to lose if your hard drive ever crashes and eats your files. It’s more expensive NOT to make a backup.
Some day, it could be you at our service counter, begging us to restore your files, only to hear that we can’t. Get a backup drive and use it. You’ll thank yourself later.