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A hard drive backup of the hard disk in your computer is a critical component to ensuring that the digital information stored on your hard drive is not lost.

Hard disk drives are wonderful for storing digital scrapbooking projects and any other digital files. Hard drives provide fast random access to information and very high storage capacity at an economical price. However, the one shortcoming of hard drives is that they can fail. This is not unusual as all storage media will fail at one point or another, but for hard drives failure means the loss of hundreds of GB of information, often irreplaceable information. A hard drive backup will prevent the loss of this valuable data.

Hard drives contain rigid disks inside of a case. Within the case are mechanical parts and like all mechanical parts, failure can occur. Some hard disk drives will fail quite early in their lifetime such as within a few weeks or a couple of months of use. This is often due to manufacturing defects. A large portion of hard drives will be used without problems for a 2 to 5 year period. This is generally considered to be the lifetime range for a hard drive. Finally, at the tail end of the 2 to 5 year time frame, more and more failures occur as the hard drives begin to wear out. This is the general pattern of failure if no other forces are responsible for the failure such as exposure of the computer and/or hard drive to physical damage. One thing to keep in mind is that at any time, hard disk drives can fail and often without warning. One day the computer is working and there is no problem accessing the files and the next day maybe not. This is why the backup hard drive issue is important.

A hard drive backup can be performed in several ways. One method is to save everything on the hard drive as is. Due to the large size of modern day hard drives, the easiest and most convenient way to do this is with another hard drive, typically an external hard drive with a USB or Firewire connection. (Using multiples of lower capacity formats such as CDs and DVDs simply does not make sense for this method because the computer backup would require many disks.) Large capacity external hard drives are very inexpensive these days. Of course, the external hard drive capacity should be similar to the hard drive that is being backed up.

Another complete hard drive backup method is to use high capacity data tape such as LTO. This requires a tape drive which costs one to two thousand dollars for the most recent version. The computer would also need to have a SCSI connection and therefore, a special card may also need to be purchased. For home use, the computer backup hard drive on tape is not feasible. Other options such as SAN (storage area network) or NAS (network attached storage) are available, but only implemented when very large amounts of data need to be stored or backed up. Note that another drawback of backing up the complete hard drive is the time required to save such a large amount of information.

A more plausible strategy for hard drive backup in the home environment is to select which information definitely cannot be lost. This is usually digital video from camcorders, digital audio, digital photos, emails, and various text files. By keeping these types of files properly organized on the computer, hard disk backup can be performed quite easily. This computer backup hard drive scenario requires much less storage space and therefore a wider range of backup storage media can be used such as external hard drives and recordable or erasable CDs, DVDs, or Blu Ray. There are also off-site storage options for computer backup, where a company will store your information on their servers. The information is transferred through your internet connection. It would be a good idea to verify how secure your data are with the chosen company and what would happen to your information should the company go out of business.

Finally, a hard drive computer backup should be performed regularly. The media on which the backup hard drive exists should not be stored next to the computer. Instead, ideally, it should be stored in a different building, but this is not always practical. However, the hard drive backup should at least be stored in a separate location of the same building, as far away from the computer as possible. Another option is to store regular computer backups in a separate location in the house and periodic backups in a different building.

Safeguard your digital scrapbooking projects and other precious digital memories by implementing proper hard disk backup procedures.

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