In this continued guest post Brent Bloodworth IT specialist extraordinaire of Binary Rescue and Binary Business talks about securing your digital images for the future.

Dead hard drive

Protect Your Photos and Your Wallet: Disaster Strikes

It is the first question I hear after delivery the bad news. “What did I do to cause this?” Almost every time the answer is nothing. I have seen hard drives last 8 years and I have seen them fail after 8 minutes. The truth is that all storage mediums, hard drives, memory cards, CD/DVD, etc are all vulnerable. The best way to protect your valuable files is to understand the threats and put systems in place to protect them. So what are those threats?

Hard drives are the most common storage medium and paradoxically in many ways the most vulnerable. Most people know that hard drives often fall victim to the click of death. What people don’t know is that hard drives are also sensitive to temperature changes and humidity. Even the magnets within the speakers in your car or home stereo can damage a hard drive. A slight jarring of the computer when files are being written or read can also render a hard drive a paperweight.

The most common mistake I see with the memory cards involves user error. Many times I have heard tales of woe involving photos getting overwritten. The story usually sounds something like this, “I deleted the wrong files to free up some room” or “I grabbed the wrong memory card and erased it.”. Other common scenarios include losing the card, theft, rain, dropping the card into water or spilling a glass of water/beer/coke into the camera or card reader.

Tragically the burnable CDs and DVDs that we use in computers and consumer electronics have a limited shelf life. The dyes in the CD/DVD that allow a burner to write to the disc also fade over time. According to a physicist for IBM the lifespan can be as short as two years. We all know that scratches can easily ruin a CD. Many people do not know that while the bottom of a CD/DVD is fairly resilient to scratches, a very small scratch to the top of the the disc is far more damaging. The problem is the top of these discs are protected with very little protection. In many cases simply trying to write on the disc with a standard ballpoint pen will render the disc unreadable.

Although the situation sounds bleak it is possible to ensure you files will remain safe. Combine a little awareness with adequate safety measures and you can still sleep comfortably at night. Next time I will describe the systems you can put into place to protect your irreplaceable photos and files. Until then, one copy is bad, two copies are better and three copies will keep you safe.

Photograph Dead hard drive by -fumtu

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