Hard drives never break down … Or do they?

“My hard drive is immortal.” Almost certainly we have never said this phrase aloud, not even mentally, but perhaps it is a diffuse feeling we have as we work on our computer hour after hour, day after day, month after month.

Relying on the highly reliable technology of hard drives is reasonable: they are very secure devices with a half-life of several years. However, faults can occur as with any other electronic or mechanical device for solid state drive repair.

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What can happen?

The light goes out while the disc is in operation, the computer overheats due to poor ventilation, something falls and hits … And of course, other major disasters, such as virus attacks, sabotage, fire, flood, unwanted formatting, etc. These are just some possible situations that will cause electromechanical breakdowns and prevent us from accessing our data.

Of course, in many cases, the disk fails without warning. That’s why we never tire of remembering the importance of having backup copies. However, we know that not everyone does it and, what is more, that even copy systems can fail. Thus, we get many customers whose only copy of their valuable data is stuck inside a broken disk.

To try to dismantle that false sense of security that is often (“To break the hard drive? That does not happen to me …”), we tell you, as a diary, some recent cases that we have attended.

MONDAY

Company of the pastry sector. Failure of the RAID system of its central offices that contained the accounting of the company. They have moved from 400 km to our laboratory in Madrid. Our technicians have been able to mount the RAID system again, with more than eight disks, and have been able to recover all the data. The client was very happy; As a nice detail, they brought us sweets for all the workers.

TUESDAY

Law Firm. One of the partners of the firm, with more than twenty years in the world of law, has brought us today his hard drive, very worried because it had stopped working. I thought that these devices never broke down and I did not have a copy anywhere of all the work of these years: documents, projects, etc. Finally, we have been able to recover the data of his entire professional career.

WEDNESDAY

A father has come early in the morning. Your son’s hard drive, a university student, has stopped working. The day after tomorrow he has to deliver the final year project. He has been working on this project all year. Express Recovery. Finally, he was able to present the work on a date without any setback.

THURSDAY

A RAID system has arrived from a graphic design studio, with three hard disks mounted as RAID 5. They have suffered a power outage and this has caused the breakdown of one of the disks. The RAID system should be rebuilt automatically but in this process, the controller has failed and they have lost access to the data. The case was difficult because one of the discs was also giving internal reading errors. Due to the severe failure, the deadlines have not been met, but the laboratory has worked intensively for five days and finally managed to recover the data.

FRIDAY

Today we have been called by a company with a virus on the hard drive that has erased the data from one of its main managers. The user has not realized what happened to him. The virus had destroyed information irreversibly; Fortunately, the most important data for the client was intact and could be recovered.

As you can see, all types of people and companies are faced with unexpected failures of their hard drives and other storage systems.

It is convenient to make backups in a systematic and preferably automated way. If the hard drive fails and there is no backup, or can not be accessed by other faults, to avoid irreparable damage it is recommended to turn off the system and use a professional data recovery service.