Quick Computer Lesson!

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This is a 650 word, 3 or 4 minute must read that explains “need to know” computer info.

Many people think of a computer as they would a solidly built piece of furniture.  They think that with little or no maintenance they’ll be able to use it for ever and ever.  A computer is actually like a finely built automobile… we still need to give it some TLC (tender loving care) and sometimes it can leave you stranded on the side of the road anyway.

A computer is made up of a few components… one of them being a hard drive.  A hard drive can physically vary in size from that of half the size of a deck of cards to two or three times the size of a deck of cards.  The important thing to note is that, for all general purposes, the hard drive IS the computer.  It contains all of your programs and data.  Your valued documents, pictures and music are on the hard drive.

A hard drive is similar to a CD player… except that the CD (platter) is sealed inside the CD player… you cannot change it.  When the computer is active the platter is spinning inside its housing at a rate of at least 5,400 revolutions per minute!  Many drives spin at 7,200 or 10,000 or even 15,000 revolutions per minute!  The “needle” that is reading and writing your stuff to the platter is sitting only a hair or two above the surface… and, on top of it all, the needle is actually reading and writing tiny electrical impulses that are magnetically held to the platter.  All of this leads to a very complex fragile mechanism.

A computer crash is something bad happening to the hard drive… a power fluctuation can disturb the electrical impulses sitting on the platter, the platter can become “scratched”, the motor in the drive can go bad or the a piece of equipment (the needle, the needle arm, the thing spinning the platter, etc) could die.

There have been many times when I’ve had to go out to a crashed customer and had them ask “Do these things normally happen?”  Absolutely.  Think of a hard drive as a tire on your car… it is only a matter of time that tire is going to give out.  Sometimes you can patch the tire and you’re good to go… other times you have a blow out and need to get a new tire.  When your hard drive “blows out” it is dead and all data is lost… period.

You cannot prevent a drive from crashing anymore than you can prevent a tire from blowing out… but you can be ready for it.  Just as you should carry a spare tire in the trunk of your car you should have a backup of your hard drive.  When your hard drive crashes you can pull your data from a backup and put it back onto a new hard drive (or new computer).

I’ve had some customers that get an external drive and MOVE all their data to it thinking that they are good to go.  The external drive is simply another hard drive… it can crash at any time.   The key is to keep the data on your computer and a COPY on the external drive… this way you always have two copies.  Even better is to have a third copy stored off-site… thus if the worse happens (the house burns to the ground destroying your computer and external drive) you can pull your data down from the Internet.  Carbonite is a popular off-site backup service that currently runs $55 a year.

I hope this helps to clarify the importance of the hard drive and to explain how vulnerable your data is.  I hate going to a customer and NOT being able to pull their precious pictures from a dead drive when they don’t have a backup.

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