An often over looked part of spring cleaning is that ten year old computer sitting in the corner or those 3 ten year old computers sitting in the back of the garage.  But they don’t take up much room right and you don’t want to lose whatever important documents or files you’re sure are on those hard drives, right…

There’s a better solution and there is no time like spring cleaning to kill two birds with one stone.  Take your old computers to a local computer company and have the documents and pictures transferred to a thumb drive, DVD, or external hard drive.  If you find the right company they’ll even recycle the computer for you while they’re at it.  Now you have your data and aren’t trying to store bulky computers.

Something else to consider about that data you’re trying to preserve in those dusty old computers is whether or not that data is even still accessible or if the hard drives have gone bad sitting there.

Several things can happen to drives that are not carefully handled and stored in anti-static bags:

1. Mechanical Failure – There can be issues with the bearings or an electrical issue causing a drive to no longer spin up.
2. Magnetic Field Breakdown – The magnetic parts that store the “bits” are affected by adjacent parts and can become corrupted over time.
3. Environmental Factors – Garages and storage units get hot and cold and dusty, none of these weather cycles over the course of years are good on a hard drive.  Overheating in particular is known to cause hard drive platters to expand causing catastrophic failures.

So that computer has been hanging out in the garage for 10 years, you take it to have the data put on other media only to find out the drive is bad.  Now you’re left with the difficult decision about how important is that data?  And worse is that after 10 years you may not exactly remember what was so important to keep, all you remember is it was important enough to hold on to that computer for all those years.  So now you have to decide is it now worth hundreds of dollars to recover?

Save yourself the headache and the heartache, get the data off old drives now and free up a little extra space in your garage or storage unit while you’re at it!

Call or email Top Speed Computer Services today to find out more about getting your data off those old drives.

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