One of the first things I ask people with ‘dead’ laptops is, ‘What’s on this machine that’s important to you?’. The most common reply is ‘Years of photos or documents!’, the value of which far outweighs what is often their aging laptop. Sometimes, horrifingly, there’s the data of a whole small business on the hard drive and no backup ever made.

The HDD or Hard Disk Drive is / was a clever invention and facinating to look inside of. It works like a record player albeit with magnetic spinning metal platters as opposed to vinyl. I’d say it serves as a long term memory for computers but for the fact that its lifespan, owing to it being mechanical, is only about three to five (maybe six years). Not so long term then!

Some signs that your hard drive is in a ‘pre-fail’ state include:

• A very slow computer
• Distinct noises such as clicking and grinding sounds
• Errors accessing files or notifications about bad sectors and corrupted

The demise of a HDD drive, although not always immediate is nevertheless a fairly slippery slope into total failure. Sudbury Mac Repairs can often recover data from failing or seemingly failed hard drives. Whilst not specialists in data recovery (which are very expensive) our success rate isn’t bad at all.

Moral of this story…

Make a backup of your data before it’s too late!

Get your photos, documents and ‘stuff’ copied onto an external drive (or uploaded into the Cloud). Make a second copy on another external drive and keep it ‘offsite’, somewhere safe, with a relative perhaps.