Redundancy is one of those words that tends to get a bad reputation outside the world of technology. In everyday conversation, it often suggests something unnecessary, repetitive, or even wasteful. In the workplace, it can carry an even heavier meaning, tied to job cuts or roles being phased out. Yet in computing, redundancy refers to a form of protection, a deliberate choice to keep extra copies, extra power, or extra safeguards in place so your PC can survive the unexpected. This month, let’s touch on the benefits of redundancy when it comes to maintaining good computing habits.
Modern hard drives are reliable, but they are still mechanical devices that can stop working without much warning; recent data suggests that hard drives fail at a rate of about 1-2% a year. Solid-state drives are more dependable on average but are still not completely immune to corruption or failure. When drive failures happen, the difference between a minor inconvenience and a major crisis usually comes down to whether a second copy of your files exists somewhere else. A redundant drive, like an external drive or a cloud backup, can turn what would have been a permanent loss into a straightforward restore process.
Of course, even if your drives are working fine, it’s easy to overwrite a document or misplace a folder, and software bugs occasionally damage files in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Keeping redundant files, and in particular versioned backups of your files, allows you to roll back to an earlier state rather than trying to repair something that’s already broken. I personally use GitHub to maintain project code and documents so that if I mess up, I can just roll back to before my mistake and keep working; it also lets me synchronize my files across multiple computers without having to worry about losing my progress.
You can also practice redundancy for your PC as a whole. A backup battery for your computer, often called an uninterruptible power supply or UPS, helps you avoid sudden, preventable issues due to power outages and brief electrical dips. These types of things happen more often than people realize. When the lights flicker or the power cuts out entirely, a backup battery keeps your computer and monitor running long enough to save work, shut down safely, or ride out a short interruption. Instead of relying on a single, fragile connection to the wall, you gain a second line of defense that prevents small disruptions that can otherwise lead to data loss or file corruption.
And redundancy doesn’t stop being useful once you step away from your own desk. The same idea - having a fallback ready when something goes wrong - shows up in everything from home networking gear to cloud services and even the devices we rely on every day. Routers with backup connections keep households online during service hiccups, phones sync data across multiple locations to prevent loss, and online platforms mirror information across servers so a single failure doesn’t bring everything down. In each case, redundancy goes a long way in keeping the tools we rely on running smoothly.