Backups are your friend. Redundancy is your friend, and redundancy is also your friend.


I can't tell you the amount of data I've tried to recover from toasted drives over the years. I'm singularly disappointed that so many people don't at least keep a second copy somewhere on a disc or drive, but I guess most people are happy to believe it won't happen to them.


My personal advice to everyone that has data that's too important to lose is to use a RAID 1 or RAID 5 configuration with at least 4 drives. There's no such thing as enough redundancy for data security, and 100 new drives at 100 each are still cheaper than most data recovery services (the good ones run $15,000+ for larger drives). As a secondary, it's not a bad idea to burn all data to DVD's once a week/month, even with a RAID, because those DVD's offer an off-site backup in the event of fire, flood, or electrical damages.
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