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Imagine losing all your music, photos, letters, financial records, addresses and phone numbers.
In the real world, that would take a catastrophic accident (or a very thorough burglar) but in the digital world,
it can happen in an instant. And it can happen to anyone.
Last year, comedian Dom Joly dropped his laptop and got what he calls “the click of death” when he tried to turn it on.
“My hard drive was permanently damaged, “ recalls Joly.
“I lost 5000 photos – of my kids as babies, wedding pictures and Robert Smith from The Cure in my kitchen.
I also lost more than 6000 songs on iTunes, a book was writing and all my old newspaper columns. In short,
I lost my entire identity!”
All is not lost
We’re increasingly relying on computers to store the most important things in our lives –
from our favourite mp3 tunes to precious digital photos.
But, as Joly found, the hard discs inside them are relatively fragile,
spinning at thousands of revolutions a minute and revolutions a minute and vulnerable to the slightest knock.
Even if you handle your PC with kids gloves, all hard drives eventually wear out.
The life expectancy for a drive used daily is three to five years, although some fail much earlier.
The answer is to back up your data as often as possible.
The simplest way is to copy files to CD or DVD disc.
Most home computers have a recordable CD burner built in or you can buy an
external drive (from around £60) that connects with a USB cable.
Blank discs are cheap but the problem comes when you start to build up serious photo or mp3 collection.
CDs can store 700mb of data at most – that’s only about 140mp3 tunes or 200 high- resolution digital photos,
while DVDs can hold six times as much.
If you don’t want to spend all your time burning discs, consider buying an external hard drive.
If you buy one the same size (or perhaps slightly larger) than your computers hard drive,
you can simply duplicate all your data, with regular, automatic updates.
Pod goes to pot
As technology moves on, its not just computers that are at risk.
Apple iPods contain a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive that just as sensitive to drops and malfunction.
Brad Cahoon of Data Recovery Direct says: “the early 15gb and 20gb iPods are getting old
now and we’re seeing their drives wearing out and crashing, just like any other hard disc”.
Fixing an iPod is no different to restoring a PC drive.
Some of it can be done with specialist software –
but serious mechanical faults require disassembling the drive in a dust-free “Class 100” clean room.
“The good news is we’ve never had an iPod we couldn’t fix”, claims Cahoon.
The bad news is that none of this comes cheap.
Fixing a basic hard drive problem on an iPods or PC starts at around £250,
growing to £500 or even £1000 to get inside the unit. So unless you fancy spending more than your
computer costs to extract your digital memories, get backing up today.
Link to the Online Metro
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