Originally published August 4 2005
Columnist emphasizes need for proper hard drive maintenance
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
New York Times columnist Glenn Fleishman's cousin is a statistical anomaly since he has suffered seven mechanical hard drive failures in five computers, and Fleishman notes that his cousin's situation is paralleled by millions of Americans who need to know the secrets to good hard drive hygiene.
Banning the house cleaner from his home office--he found she was smashing her vacuum into his running computers--had no effect.
His woes ended three years ago with the installation of a belt-and-suspenders data backup system.
Every bit written to his main drive is simultaneously copied, or mirrored, to a backup drive.
Creating perfect duplicates of his data allowed my cousin the peace of mind to know that even in a catastrophic failure, he could turn to the mirrored drive or critical files on it and be back to work in minutes.
Ever-increasing quantities of private and family data are kept on home computers.
But until the last two years, there was a gap between the ever larger hard-disk drives that came with home computers and affordable methods to archive the gigabytes of documents, e-mail messages, home movies and MP3s.
That gap has closed as consumer backup software has added features to write archives directly to external hard drives and higher-capacity DVD burners.
All mainstream operating systems comprise a mix of kinds of files.
The most comprehensive way to duplicate a computer's data is to use software that can handle every kind of file, and store the state of those systems as a snapshot in time.
This is a trickier task than it sounds, as some files are hidden or have odd properties.
Just dragging a hard-disk icon on the desktop onto a similar hard drive's icon won't work because of these arcane files and obscure aspects of how a hard disk and an operating system talk to each other.
(Mac OS, up to version 9, had the unique ability to just copy a drive; it was lost with Apple Computer's switch to Unix underpinnings.)
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