As I mentioned in my last post, hard drive failure is a virtual certainty. It's going to happen to every drive, eventually. The trick to not having your day (or your life) ruined by such and event lies in a) having an up-to-date backup and, if possible, b) being as prepared for drive's failure as possible. To this end, here are two resources to help you and me be prepared for the inevitable:
SuperDuper. If you don't know of this application, prepare to meet your new best friend. It clones hard drives. Reliably. A limited version is available for free. For under $30 you can buy the fully featured version, which allows you to schedule backups and does smart updates (i.e., it copies even faster). I've used SuperDuper for years and see no reason to change as long as it works but, as an FYI, Carbon Copy Cloner does similar things and is donationware.
SMARTReporter. This nifty application checks on the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) status of your hard drive to see if it has any problems. It is, as the folks at Corecode note, a kind of "early warning system" to notify you (by email, alert, etc.) of a possibly impending hard drive crash. Useful stuff, particularly if you've not run a backup recently. The one hitch: SMART technology does not work with USB and FireWire drives. All the more reason to schedule backups so they're always up-to-date.
In my experience, I have found that a drive's likelhood to fail is directly proportionate to its need to work on a given day. One example: On the day I was set to drive to 200 miles to a post house to do the final output of Quick Feet Soft Hands for television broadcast my raid, storing all of my Final Cut Pro and Color files failed. Thankfully, I had an exact clone and didn't skip a beat.
Suggestions for further reading:
How Do You Make a Filmmaker Cry?
What to Do When Your Hard Drive Goes Soft