If you’ve been using external USB hard disks for any length of time you probably already know that they’re great little devices up until the day that they decide to stop working.

External hard disks are a cost effective way to expand a computer or laptops storage capacity but they can be very expensive to recover data from should they fail.

A traditional mechanical hard disk is not so different from a record player. Inside you have a spinning platter with a very small needle that reads and writes data to and from the magnetic surface of the disk.

Hard disk failures can involve either physical damage, logical damage or both. With a physical failure this might mean that the motor has failed or that the read/write head is damaged. Whereas logical damage is when the integrity of the data stored on the disk has become corrupt in such a way that a computer is no longer able to interpret the data that’s stored on the disk and subsequently doesn’t know what to do with it.

That is all to say there are lots of different ways you might find that a hard disk stops working. Here we discuss a few key points that can hopefully save you time, stress and expenses should the worst happen to one of your disks.

Important Data? Back it up twice!

This sounds like its so obvious that its not worth mentioning, but when we’re short on time or just not expecting a hard disk to fail we might get comfortable storing our entire photo library or accounting data on a single disk.

A simple straight forward solution is purchasing a second hard disk that you can keep at the back of a drawer or simply out of harms way. Selecting all the files you feel are important from your primary disk and simply “copy / paste’ing” them to the second backup disk.

If you have a lot of data to deal with then the task of keeping a separate backup can be time consuming and you might well find months can go by without a reasonable opportunity to backup your data.

For this scenario you will likely want some type of automated backup solution, coupling this with a physical disk you own (a second backup) can be inconvenient but for busy folks this is where the option of a cloud backup has real utility.

If your data doesn’t take up alot of space then even using a free DropBox or Gmail account (Google Drive) and using the “selective sync” option to only backup the files and data that are most important to you is an easy to adopt solution.

When you have more data than you know what to do with, one of our recommended solutions is Backblaze.