Data Protection Strategy: Safeguarding Files on a Hard Drive Among common maintenance actions, which one best protects your data against loss from hardware failure, corruption, or accidental deletion?

Introduction / Context:
Drives can fail suddenly, malware can encrypt files, and user mistakes happen. While maintenance improves performance and health, only a proper copy of your data elsewhere guarantees recovery. This question distinguishes preventative maintenance from true data protection.

Given Data / Assumptions:

• Typical desktop or laptop usage with important documents and media.
• Potential threats include drive failure, ransomware, and accidental deletion.
• Access to external drives or cloud services for backups.

Concept / Approach:

Backups create independent copies of data stored on different media or locations. Even if the original disk is lost or corrupted, the backup can be restored. Defragmentation and file-system checks improve performance and fix metadata errors, but they do not recover lost files after catastrophic failures.

Step-by-Step Solution:

Verification / Alternative check:

Perform a controlled restore test to verify integrity. Monitor backup logs and storage capacity alerts.

Why Other Options Are Wrong:

Defrag improves file placement; chkdsk/scandisk repair file systems; diagnostics may predict some failures. None guarantees data recovery after loss. Only backups provide that safety net.

Common Pitfalls:

Keeping the only backup connected (risk of theft/malware), never testing restores, or assuming RAID is a backup (it is not; it improves availability, not history).

Final Answer:

regular backups