Teach Your Hard Drive a Lesson – the Hard Way

Data recovery providers are the last resort when things go extremely, and I mean extremely nasty with your computer. Among the most precious things to lose when your hard drive fails are pictures of your ex or the final paper your promotion depends on.

There are times when such disasters occur because of a defective drive and then you can only blame it on the manufacturer, and take comfort in an alleged lawsuit that would never come. Some other times, the disaster is inflicted by the users' not being able to bear with the most elementary guidelines regarding hard drive manipulation.

If you have ever had to recover precious files, then the Kroll Ontrack name should sound familiar. The data recovery specialists that work for the company have witnessed the most spectacular ways of screwing both hard disks and the users' data stored on them.

"We're always fascinated by the extraordinary things people do to data that is often irreplaceable", said Phil Bridge, Managing Director at Kroll Ontrack UK. There are times when hard drives are literally buggy, or so happened to a Thai computer user. The guy had a top hard drive failure after having successfully used insect repellent to exterminate a colony of ants used to fool around onto his external hard drive. He successfully terminated the colony as well as the hard drive and the data on it. Plain stupid.

Brits suffer from severe sparks of wisdom, too. A tech-wannabe who would lose focus while working because of the squeaking noise coming from his hard drive decided that it's time to grease the device. After prolonged meditation, he merely drilled the hard drive's case and poured enough oil to prevent further squeaking. It was damn efficient, as the disk not only stopped squeaking, but also stopped working. Forever.

There are many ways of making sure that your data is safe, including redundant array systems, permanent and complete backup of your data on the favorite storage media, online backup subscription, but the greatest thing the user can stick to is common sense in operating such fragile devices. I think that people should benefit from common sense training programs in schools. If they managed with learning safe sex, they should do fine with learning safe hard drive operation.

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