Some people think they’re free from hard drive and other storage media failures. Actually, they are, for a while. It’s one of those laws of the nature you can’t avoid, everyone will have a hard disk failure in their life at least once, given they use computers.

A hard disk drive is a set of spinning disks and as such it’s prone to mechanical damage. It cannot be avoided as it’s an inherent design flaw. Well, not flaw but this was the best solution we have had for massive data storage for years.

There are two ways to prevent data loss. There is the cheap and the expensive way. Most people who think they’re safe from any data loss because they’ve yet to see a hard disk that dies will choose the expensive way. Or will be forced to take it due to lack of choice. The cheap way is to back up data regularly. I personally suggest you to take the cheap route and back up everything you would absolutely hate losing.

Use at least 2-3 different types of storage media. If your main storage is a hard disk drive, put everything on a pen drive too, preferably write a DVD as well. I like online backup systems the best because they’re available everywhere I can connect to the net.

There are multiple free solutions, dropbox for example gives you 2GB storage free, and you can use it like any other folder on your pc. It’s comfortable, free and fast.

The expensive way is also working for people who like to spend money on getting data back. I don’t but that’s just me. There are data recovery experts who can get all your data back for a healthy fee. If it’s a hard drive, I advise everyone going for the service to quit trying to fix it at home.

There are software solutions that can recover data on a deleted hard drive, but I’d be surprised if any software could fix a jammed head or other mechanical failure. A data recovery expert will be able to examine the drive and decide what steps are necessary. If they see that someone has tried to open the drive or fumbled around with the file system, they’ll charge more, or deny fixing it altogether.

I would not risk that. Data recovery is expensive, depending on the failed media it can be anything from a hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. A collapsed server disk raid may cost even something over ten thousand dollars.

Backing up everything may add some cost to your data storage, that second hard drive doesn’t come free, but it’s definitely cheaper than even a consultation with a data recovery expert