Today, at about 8:00 AM, a hard drive in our our work email server decided that life wasn't worth living, and it ended its life in a rather dramatic noisy fashion, with grinding and groaning.

At this point, many of you are expecting the story to be full of wailing and gnashing of teeth as our business ceased to function.

In fact, our IT director came in at the normal work time, pulled out the dead disk from the RAID array and popped in another. It took a few hours for the disk to synch up with the other disks in the RAID array, but aside from some slowness, nobody noticed.

That got me to thinking about how many times I've had people come to me, devastated that they lost data when a hard drive goes bad. All hard drives go bad.

So, if you don't have a solid and effective data backup plan, consider starting one - now.

Also, I've been saving useful web sites, in their entirety (for example, Wikipedia), for offline access.

A Terabyte drive is like $100 these days - there's no reason not to back up things that matter to you.