5 Tips to Prevent Your Hard Drive from Crashing

Have you ever lost important data on your hard drive? If you have, you understand the heartache that comes with it. Unfortunately, if you are like most people today, the answer to this question is yes! In fact, new research indicates that most people have at least one hard drive crash in their past; some of them have had more than one! Most data recovery experts will tell you that there are two main causes of hard drive crashes: hardware and software errors. To help ensure that your hard drive doesn’t crash in the future, here are five tips to help prevent your hard drive from crashing again.

How To Prevent A Hard Drive Crash

Backing up your hard drive is one of those things that we know we should do, but rarely do. It seems like a waste of time or money until it’s too late, and then you wish you had taken a few minutes out of each day (or week) to save your computer files. So how can you stop yourself from having a heart attack when your hard drive crashes? Try these five simple ways.

1) Backup your data

Before you can prevent a hard drive crash, you have to know what will cause one. The most common reason for a hard drive crash is data loss. If your computer doesn’t have enough space for your files, if you’re using a program that opens every file on your computer at once, or if power surges or brownouts strike during critical write operations—your hard drive could be in trouble. The only surefire way to prevent damage is by practicing good backup habits: keeping an off-site backup of all important files and backing up new files immediately after they are saved. You can also protect yourself against accidental corruption and other kinds of data loss by regularly running disk defragmentation software and performing regular disk checks (Google both terms for instructions).

2) Update your operating system and programs

Many crashes are caused by out-of-date programs, so it’s important to keep your operating system and applications up-to-date. You don’t have to wait for a program or OS update notification; you can always check what version of your software you’re running on their website. If it’s been a while since you updated, do it now.

3) Format your hard drive

As you put more and more data on your hard drive, it starts to fill up. And as it fills up, your computer becomes increasingly slower because it has less space to store files and programs. To solve that problem, try formatting your hard drive. How? Simply go into My Computer or This PC if you're using Windows 8 and select Manage, then Disk Management. From there, right-click on your hard drive (most likely named C:), select Format then follow a series of prompts. This may take a while, but rest assured that formatting will increase performance by ensuring your computer doesn't have too much data for its processor to handle.

4) Optimize your computer for best performance

It’s a rare piece of tech that doesn’t run better after a fresh install of its operating system, but your computer is no exception. And it’s even more important if you've had your hard drive crash in recent weeks or months. After all, if your OS is full of problems, your computer will likely be affected as well. Make sure you've got all critical updates installed and take some time to clear out any unnecessary files that may be bogging down your hard drive.