But if you have priceless family photos on the drive, it may be worth it to you. If your hard drive has already stopped working, things get a lot tougher, and you'll probably need a professional data recovery service like DriveSavers (Opens in a new window), which can cost $1,000 or more. Then, once you know those are safe, try doing a full drive clone with something like EaseUS Todo Backup Free (Opens in a new window) (Windows) or Carbon Copy Cloner (Opens in a new window) (Mac). Instead, plug in an external drive and copy your most important files onto it-family photos, work documents, and anything else that can't easily be replaced. However, now is not the time for a full backup you don't want to stress the drive with too many reads, or it could fail while you're backing up. But if you're getting warnings, it's time to back up your files before your drive kicks the bucket. They could chug along for a year or two, or be dead as a doornail in a week. These tools can sometimes take into account certain technologies specific to their hard drives and SSDs.ĭrives with the Caution or Pred Fail status won't necessarily fail tomorrow.

For example, Seagate has SeaTools (Opens in a new window) for its drives, Western Digital has Western Digital Dashboard (Opens in a new window) for its drives, and Samsung has Samsung Magician (Opens in a new window) for its SSDs. If you want an even deeper, more accurate picture into your drive's health, check its manufacturer's website for a dedicated tool. So a Caution label is usually a good indicator that you should back up the drive and think about replacing it soon, even if you aren't having problems yet. But if even one of those bad sectors lands on a file you need, it can be rendered corrupt. These labels apply to hard drives and SSDs that are starting to wear down, but aren't necessarily on their deathbed (read more about how CrystalDiskInfo applies those labels here (Opens in a new window)).įor example, your drive may have a few bad and reallocated sectors, and you still might not have run into any issues-probably because those bad sectors weren't housing any actual data at the time. Instead of saying your drive is OK or Bad, like the built-in tools do, CrystalDiskInfo and DriveDx also have more intermediary labels, like Caution or Warning, respectively.

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