Friday 1 January 2010

Do we need Surge Protection for Computers?

Couple of weeks back the unthinkable happened. Whilst my son was  working on the Desktop PC, there was a power surge and the hard disk electronics got fried, essentially rendering the hard disk unusable (unless you have the money and time to recover the data). Luckily, I backed up the two resident Windows operating systems (XP and 7) on the disk a day before, which made the task of reinstating them a bit easier. But I lost the music files stored on another partition, which I didn't backup.

Now comes the question, do we need Surge Protection for Computers? I didn't think about this question until I lost the hard disk. I also discovered that it is not cheap to recover data from a failed hard disk, especially if it is to do with its electronics. The cost would run into hundreds of pounds (in excess of £400).

A typical Belkin Surge Protector costs upward of £20. I recommend anyone with a desktop computer to invest in a Surge Protector, as it would save the agony of replacing a hard disk (which costs about £60 for 1 TB and £85 for 1.5 TB)  if one doesn't have the habit of backing up their hard disk regularly and there is power surge (a rare occurence, in countries like UK).

As fate had it that day, I only lost a hard disk. It could have been lot worse.

Now comes the next question, do we need to backup our hard disks regularly? I would say atleast a monthly backup (if not weekly backup) is an absolute must, if one does not want to loose their life time work stored on their computers.