Hard Drive Failure

Want to feel panic and have a cold sweat break out? Just wait until you see an error box on your screen with the words "Hard Drive Failure".

It can make your blood run cold.

Don't lose your temper when your computer loses its drive...

Computer hard drives crash all the time. They are a mechanical device which are constantly spinning so they are bound to break at some point.

If yours died right this second as you are reading this, how much would it affect you?

Think of all of the projects, articles, photos, receipts, files... all gone.

Many people don't back up often enough because of confusion as to the best way to do it.

Two Choices

When it comes to backing up your data, you have two choices. On site or online.

If you don't have that big of data to backup, you may consider an online backup company. Just keep an eye out on how much they charge. If you have several Gigabytes of storage, it can add up pretty quickly with their month to month fees.

Personally, I prefer to back things up myself. Especially after I came across the following solution.

A Great Solution

With the drop in prices for harddrives, there isn't much of an excuse to get a backup one for archiving purposes.

The old days required you to hard wire your extra drive into your computer. Most people were not comfortable or knowledgeable enough to do this.

There is now a very simple solution:

External USB or Firewire Drives.

An external firewire drive

I have several firewire drives that are as simple to use as plugging them into a firewire slot. As soon as it is connected, my computer (with Windows XP) recognizes it and I can start using it.

I can daisy chain multiple firewire drives together. One plugs into the other and Windows assigns a new drive letter to each one.

The external drives I get are from ewaggle.com. Here's a look at some of the drives they offer.

They come in a metallic (very cool looking) case called a "Metal Gear" case. These cases come in USB 2.0 and/or Firewire connections. I prefer to get the combo of the two, just in case.

Once you have one case, you can swap in or out any drive from another computer if you want. The Metal Gear case basically lets your computer talk to another drive via the connection.

Instead of swapping drives in and out, I prefer to get a separate Metal Gear case for different projects I am working on.

Since my DVD projects take up a lot of space, I get a Metal Gear Case with an 80 GB drive. This can handle 2 projects at a time. If a client wants a DVD, then I get a 40 GB metal gear case just for that one project. Once they have payed me in full, they get the hard drive for them to store. It is then THEIR responsibility to take care of it.

These drives are very affordable. Here are some of the recent prices for metal gear cases. This includes the harddrive and everything you need:

• 160GB of storage $148
• 120GB of storage $136
• 80GB of storage $119

These are Western Digital drives, which I have found to be very good over the years.

The Actual Backup Process

In the next article, I will share with you some considerations for backing up your data, including the software program I use.

Choosing the right software and getting into the proper backing up routine could save you from a world of stress.

In the meantime, go take a look at the www.ewaggle.com site and see if it might be time to buy a backup drive.

Of course, nothing is stopping you from getting a regular hard drive and hard wiring it into your computer. For me? I prefer the flexibility of simply plugging in a drive when I need it. Its nice having it instantly available.