Failing Harddrive – Will it affect the integrity of my data?

[rekhyt]

I have a failing hard drive on my current MacBook Pro (It is having a symptom that I previously had on a failing hard drive on a MacBook that I had – clicking drive noises).

I'm backing up my hard drive quite regularly using Time Machine and syncing some crucial files to Dropbox, but I'm afraid about the integrity of the data, meaning that if the hard drive fails, and I restore my Mac installation using Time Machine onto a new hard drive installed to the MacBook Pro, I'm afraid that some/all recent backed up data will be corrupt.

Will this happen?

 

[Gav2k]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4s: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B179 Safari/7534.48.3)

You'll kno when it's corrupting data your system will crash!

As for the clicking it may not be failing. It could just be a loud drive or the motion sensor is parkin the heads

 

[Tumbleweed666]

I have a failing hard drive on my current MacBook Pro (It is having a symptom that I previously had on a failing hard drive on a MacBook that I had – clicking drive noises).

I'm backing up my hard drive quite regularly using Time Machine and syncing some crucial files to Dropbox, but I'm afraid about the integrity of the data, meaning that if the hard drive fails, and I restore my Mac installation using Time Machine onto a new hard drive installed to the MacBook Pro, I'm afraid that some/all recent backed up data will be corrupt.

Will this happen?

It shouldn't, and with time machine if one version is corrupt, you can always backtrack to an earlier one, but I'd suggest you run a disk check and then should it prove to be failing, replace it before it fails, since the possibility is there, though its very small.

 

[Zwhaler]

At the very least go to Disk Utility and Verify Disk. Repair if necessary. I remember the clicking hard drive noise also meant impending Hard Drive crash so make sure you have everything backed up. Take some files you are worried about losing, copy them to an external drive separate from Time Machine (make sure you have that too) and connect to the external and test the file. If you can simply open the file from your external drive and it looks okay then you should be fine.