Hard drive capacity is astonishing! 1 terabyte drives are available for about $100. But if you consider that you can store 1 terabyte of data on something that only costs $100, you begin to realize that data integrity might become an issue.
If you’ve had a modern hard drive fail, you know just how much data you can lose very easily. I had a 500 gigabyte drive fail last year and it took several months for me to realize what I had lost. It was easy to dump pictures, music, videos, and documents on that drive when my other drives were getting full. Then one day I heard clicking coming from my computer room and poof! 500 gigabytes of data was gone.
Hard disk drives are no less susceptible to failure than they were 10 years ago. And since we have the ability to store so much data on a single drive we have a higher chance of losing a lot of data!
Regular backups are as important as ever since we can store so much data on a single drive. There are many ways to backup your data… some are more elegant than others. The old tape drive is still available but mainly only used in corporate environments due to the price and lack of speed. But with terabyte drives available for $100 it might make sense to simply make a copy of your data on another external hard drive at regular intervals given the price of drives.
Other options include online storage, flash drives, and RAID arrays and one of these options may make sense for your situation. But don’t wait! Get your backup solution working before you hard drive fails!