data

 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ve probably heard about the dangers of data loss. We can’t rely on one hard drive to store our most precious business data. Without a proper backup solution in place, we could find ourselves in a disastrous position. One of the reasons why data is easily lost is due to hard drive failure. It can happen for all sorts of reasons, and we’re going to enlighten you about them today.

 

Power Surges

 

If you ever get a power surge at your place of business, it might affect any electronics in the building. That goes for hard drives inside your computer, too. A drive is a delicate piece of equipment, and it struggles to handle a sudden shutdown. This is yet another reason why it’s important to shutdown your PC in the right way. Also, think about investing in a surge protector just in case this sort of thing happens to you.

 

Heat

 

Nowadays, hard drives are designed to deal with excessive heat. Still, that doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from problems in this area. Inadequate ventilation around the hard drive is a surefire path to drive failure. This can be particularly prominent in laptop devices, where airflow often isn’t as effective as in a desktop PC. Once your hard drive reaches a certain temperature, it simply can’t function as intended.

 

Human Error

 

I know you’re not surprised by this one! Hard drives are sensitive things, and they store a lot of important information that makes them compatible. It’s very easy to tinker with hard drive settings and render them useless by accident. In a case like this, disaster recovery solutions like backups will often come into play. Still, you don’t want this to happen in the first place, and proper employee training will prevent it. Those without a technical background shouldn’t be getting access to any system files like this anyway.

 

Bad Sectors

 

Sometimes, hard drives just suffer from wear and tear like everything else. They have a shelf life, and they won’t be able to continue long past it. Issues surrounding this often manifest themselves in the form of bad sectors. The hard drive will start to become sluggish, and the device might hang on a regular basis. It can mean that certain elements of the drive are no longer readable, with the damage spreading over time.

 

What Happens Next?

 

The unthinkable has happened. All that confidential data you stored on your hard drive has become corrupt. The drive is faulty, and you don’t know what to do next. In the first instance, seek a backup solution if you’ve got one. Hopefully, you’ll have either stored it on an in-house server or via a cloud service. If you haven’t, the next step is to seek out emergency data recovery services. They might be able to retrieve data from the drive, but this is anyone’s guess. This is a last resort, and there are no guarantees that it’ll be retrievable.

 

So, no matter what you do, be sure to backup your data!