Hard drives fail- so back up
Do you back up regularly? Hard drives may be more reliable than they once were but PC World reports that hard drive failure may be more common than supposed. According to the report:
Your hard drive may not be as reliable as manufacturers would like you to think. Recent studies by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Google suggest that vendor Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) ratings for hard drives are a bit misleading.
The Carnegie Mellon study, conducted at several locations, found typical failure rates of 2 to 4 percent and a high of 13 percent, in contrast to the less than 1 percent you’d expect based on vendor MTTF ratings.
Google has a lot of hard drives and they participated in the study and report an annual failure rate of about 3 percent.
So don’t forget to back up. Even a partial backup is better than nothing and some suggested easy backup procedures can be found at this link.