how to check if your hard drive stored information for mac

Check If Your Hard Drive Stored Information Full Drive Clone

Check If Your Hard Drive Stored Information Full Drive Clone

Then, once you know those are safe, you can try doing a full drive clone with something like EaseUS Todo Backup Free (Windows) or Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac).

Its starting to make clicking or screeching noises, it cant seem to find your files, and its moving really slowly.

It might be time to say farewellbut heres what you should do before it goes to the big data center in the sky.

This is normal, especially after your drive is more than a few years old.

On older spinning drives, moving parts like the motor can degrade over time, or the drives magnetic sectors can go bad.

That means even if your drive isnt making strange noises, you should keep an eye on its health once in a while, so you can prepare for death before it happens.

Most modern drives have a feature called S.M.A.R.T.

Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) that monitors different drive attributes in an attempt to detect a failing disk.

That way, your computer will automatically notify you before data loss occurs and the drive can be replaced while it still remains functional.

Just right-click the Start menu, select Run, and type cmd or type cmd into the search bar.

In the pop-up box, run: wmic diskdrive get model,status It will return Pred Fail if your drives death is imminent, or OK if it thinks the drive is doing fine.

On a Mac, you can check S.M.A.R.T.

Disk Utility from ApplicationsUtilities, clicking on the drive, and looking at S.M.A.R.T.

Status in the bottom left, which will either read Verified or Failing.

You only know when your drive is near death, but you can start to experience problems even if the basic S.M.A.R.T.

For a closer look, I recommend downloading CrystalDiskInfo for Windows (free), or DriveDx for macOS (20 with a free trial), both of which will offer up more detailed S.M.A.R.T.

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.

These labels apply to hard drives and SSDs that are starting to wear down, but arent necessarily on their deathbed (you can read more about how CrystalDiskInfo applies those labels here ).

For example, my drive above has a few bad and reallocated sectors, and I havent run into any issuesprobably because those bad sectors werent housing any actual data at the time.

But if even one of those bad sectors lands on a file you need, it can be rendered corrupt.

So that Caution label is usually a good indicator that you should back up the drive and think about replacing it sooneven if you arent having problems yet.

If you want an even deeper, more accurate picture into your drives health, check its manufacturers website for a dedicated toolfor example, Seagate has SeaTools for its drives, Western Digital has Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for its drives, and Samsung has Samsung Magician for its SSDs.

These tools can sometimes take into account certain technologies specific to their hard drives and SSDs.

But for most people, CrystalDiskInfo will give you a decent ballpark recommendation for just about any drive.

They could chug along for a year or two, or be dead as a doornail in a week.

But if youre getting warnings, its time to back up your files before your drive kicks the bucket.

Now is not the time for a full backup, however: you dont want to stress the drive with too many reads, or it could fail while youre backing up.

Instead, plug in an external drive and copy your most important files onto itfamily photos, work documents, and anything else that cant easily be replaced.

How To Check If Your Hard Drive Stored Information For Mac