Hard drives fail – there’s no getting around that. Failure is inevitable in a device with moving parts and electronics. These platter spin at thousands of revolutions per minute, so eventual data loss is inevitable. Malware, especially in PCs, can also contribute to data loss, as can simple user error. Your precious data is often priceless, and worth more than the hard drive itself, so taking steps to protect it is a no-brainer.

It goes without saying that backing up is the most important way of protecting your data. This can be to an external hard drive or cloud storage solution, but you should always have a clone of your data that can be restored in case of emergency.

Storing your hard drive in the correct conditions is crucial. Dust, heat and shock are responsible for most mechanical hard drive failures. Keep your hardware healthy by cleaning fan intakes. Similarly, do not put your CPU on the floor where there is plenty of dust to penetrate the hard drive breather hole and do not place the CPU near to a radiator.

Malicious attacks can have detrimental effects on your data. They normally arrive as an email with an attachment named as a PDF or EXE. By enabling the ability to see full file extensions in emails or even denying anything with an EXE extension, a user can easily identify suspicious activity. Browsing all emails in preview mode or better still, using a filter such as SmartScreen will keep you safe.