I was able to breathe a major sigh of relief today. My aftermarket Solid State Drive (SSD) upgrade, installed in one of my laptops, lost its filesystem. I don’t know yet if the drive itself has failed yet, but so far… not looking great for the drive.

Media reports peg SSD short-term failure rate at around two percent. That’s actually not too bad (versus traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD) failure rates), unless you’re in that two percent.

This is, yes, yet another public service announcement reminding you to backup. Your shiny new ultrabook, your shiny smartphone, and even your not-so-shiny older laptop with aftermarket SSD drive upgrade… is not safe from data loss.

And then there’s the other reason to back up, your storage medium is only half the equation. Once you get through the hardware faults, you have to tackle software problems that can wipe out your files. There’s a 50/50 chance it was file system corruption, encryption corruption, or a myriad of other issues that cost me the data on that drive. Drive-wide encryption adds to your risk. But also, just everyday crashes and filesystem chaos can wipe out data, regardless of storage medium.

So, backup… backup… backup!