Mortality & the Failing Hard Disc

I knew my computer was dying. The couple of shut-down crashes plus an actual BSOD¹ or two in the past few months let me know things were not going well. Apple famously projects a two-year lifespan for their products. After that, they are out-dated and on their way to becoming obsolete. My banger, which once once been a Vista machine, had been rebirthed as Win7, and had watched 8, 8.1, 10, and now 11 go by. It had been 12 years. If it were a girl, it’d be a bat mitzvah.

Then I came across Leila Gharani’s excellent video on 5 free Windows apps you should be using. One, I had, one I didn’t need, but three were very good.

CrystalDiskInfo is a little obscure in how it gives information. Its documentation is terrible. But it will tell you if something is going wrong with one of your hard disks. Mine was solidly in the yellow/Caution sector. I couldn’t get a percentage score on the drive, but I think that only comes up for SDDs. My Caution is based on some irreparable sectors. But look – I’ve turned it on 3,319 times. So that’s something.

Well, once you have a failing drive, what do you do? Backups.

To do these elegantly, Leila suggests, and I most heartily endorse, FreeFileSync. This utility helps you create backups and sync on a regular schedule. You can choose which drive mirrors the other, or even make sure the two mirror each other. It is a wonderful utility.

I’m upset with myself that it’s taken me this long to find it. Because I have at least nine other backups that I found across my backup storage, each one with a many of the same files over and over. This is redundancy to the point of annoyance.

But FreeFileSync freed me from much of that, and with a lot of patience and transfer, I have settled on a program and process of backups which trims down the amount of storage I devote to backups.

¹”Blue Screen of Death,” with its despair-inducing whinging reminiscent of C-3PO on Tatooine.