Everyone has lots of data, and now with the size of hard drives getting larger and prices going lower than ever, we all seem to have more and more data stored locally. Here’s a lesson you don’t want to learn the hard way: If you’ve decided it’s time to move up to the next largest backup hard drive size, WAIT before you erase your older, smaller hard drive. When we see hard drives fail, we see them die at three different times.
1. They can fail as soon as they are installed (or within 30 days).
2. At the end of their duty cycle (several years after they were deployed).
3. At any random time.
Today we helped a client who moved from a 200-gigabyte drive to a 500-gigabyte drive. He deleted the data off his old drive, and the new drive died as soon as he did that. We’re still working on getting the data back. Also, you never want to have all your data in one place. Please be careful with that data!
