IT Questions? Get the Answers: 2/15/2023

Q: My laptop fell...broke...got run over, etc. Can I get my information from it?

A: The short answer is, in many cases, yes. All computers, including laptops, are made of several individual components. The hard drive is the component that stores all your information and is hidden inside the shell of the laptop computer. Standard hard drives are built robustly to keep the sensitive parts protected from impacts. Even if the rest of the laptop is destroyed, if the hard drive survived, it can be removed and the data accessed with special equipment. Hard drives are designed with a number of safety features to prevent internal damage of the moving parts. Newer laptop computers are more often being built with Solid State Drives (SSD) which work the same as a

removable thumb drive, but with much larger storage and are mounted inside the computer. SSDs can be removed and accessed much the same as regular hard drives, so whichever type of hard drive your laptop has, there is a good chance the data can be recovered. If you have a broken laptop, contact your local

computer repair specialist to see if your data can be saved.

An excellent way to mitigate possible data loss is to regularly back up your important documents. This can be done in a couple of different ways. You can manually save your information on a portable hard drive by click-and-dragging, or copying and pasting them from your main hard drive to a portable backup hard drive. Some portable hard drives have an automatic backup function that at a given time, will create a backup copy of your files. There are also several cloud-based services that can back up your data. The benefit of cloud-based backup services is that they keep your data off-site, so even in the event of all your computer hardware being lost in a fire, your data is kept safe in another part of the country or world. The drawback is that you are trusting a company to maintain the safety and privacy of your data. By maintaining your own backed-up hard drive, you are in control over how secure that data is at the expense of the risk of physically losing or damaging your portable hard drive.

Talk to your local computer professional to find out what method of backup is right for you.