Just a friendly PSA. Alway backup your data. If not the whole drive, then at least irreplaceable files like digital photos, video and important documents. These pictures show various hard drives that I personally own that have gone bad for one reason or another over the years. Sizes range from 30 GB to 1.5 TB, brands include Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu and Western Digital and manufacture dates range from 2003 to 2010. It’s been a while since I have had one go bad. That could be a sign that drives have gotten more reliable or I could have just been lucky. One thing is for certain: a hard drive, whether mechanical or an SSD WILL go bad sooner or later and it is not guaranteed to make it until your next new computer.
Also, you shouldn’t trust 3rd party cloud services for your only data backup. If they ever go out of business, get hacked, or suffer some other disaster, no matter how unlikely that may seem, you’ll be out of luck. And always keep a backup in a separate location, preferably with some significant geographical separation. Sound paranoid? Maybe… but consider how much it would suck if you lost every digital photo, video, or other important file you have ever had.
