Internal components of a hard drive require careful handling and are susceptible to dirt, dust, scratches, fingerprints and corrosion. Therefore if a hard disk fails, one should not try to open the drive and repair it. A number of factors contribute towards increasing the likelihood of disk failure and most of these are not related to the age of the hard drive. Hard drive crashes can be caused by various reasons.
The most common reason for physical hard drive failure is a burnt circuit board as the drive does not spin in such cases. Motor failure is the next common reason and in such a case the hard drive either not spins at all or spins at degraded and unpredictable speed. Most of the time the hard drive emits a clicking sound, which indicates either corrupt firmware of head crash. Extensive data recovery efforts will be required in both these case. Some other reasons for physical drive failure include a broken read/write arm, scratched platters, bad hard drive bearings or water or fire damage to the hard drive. Viruses, cyclic redundancy errors, Blue Screen of Death and bad sectors can also the cause the hard drive to crash.
Data recovery assumes significance as the internal components of a hard disk drive are very fragile. The hard disk should be opened in a clean room environment to it from corruption. The damaged drive should be repaired first to recover the data. This repair is for short term use aimed at recovering the data only.
Back ups are additional copies of your data, which can be used in case of data loss. In the present scenario of a colossal number of unknown threats and PC glitches, backing up your valuable data is critical. This function is effectively performed by collecting, compressing, encrypting and transferring the data to the servers to provide online backup. These live back up save your computer from disasters or restore all the files that got deleted by mistake.