Hard Drive Health Monitor

This section provides information on how you can use the Kaspersky application to check the health of your computer's hard drive or a connected external hard drive.

About Hard Drive Health Monitor

Available only in Kaspersky Plus and Kaspersky Premium.

If your hard drive suddenly becomes damaged, this can cause loss of data stored on the hard drive. The Kaspersky application lets you monitor the health of your hard drives using S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology). This technology is based on continuous monitoring of the main performance characteristics of the hard drive. Using the Kaspersky application, you can quickly find out about hard drive health getting worse and copy data from damaged drives to other media.

If Hard Drive Health Monitor is enabled, the Kaspersky application constantly monitors the health of your hard drives and notifies you when the health is getting worse. You can view the health of both internal and external hard drives. Notifications about hard drive health getting worse are shown in the taskbar notification area. Detailed reports about hard drive monitoring results are shown in the Reports section.

If your hard drive’s health got worse and it is no more safe to store data on the drive, the Kaspersky application offers you to copy data from this drive to other media to avoid data loss. You can copy data from a damaged hard drive to any good medium that is available.

You can disable Hard Drive Health Monitor. After disabling Hard Drive Health Monitor, the Kaspersky application no longer notifies you about changing health of your hard drives and does not offer you to copy data from damaged drives to other media.

How to enable or disable Hard Drive Health Monitor

To enable or disable Hard Drive Health Monitor:

1. Open the main application window.
2. Click in the lower part of the main window.

   The Settings window opens.

3. Go to Performance settings → PC resource consumption.
4. Do one of the following:
   • To enable Hard Drive Health Monitor, select the Perform hard drive health scan check box.
   • To disable Hard Drive Health Monitor, clear the Perform hard drive health scan check box.

How to check health of a hard drive

The Kaspersky application constantly monitors the health of both internal and external hard drives of your computer. The monitoring works in the background. If your hard drive's health is getting worse and it is no more safe to store data on the drive, the application notifies you and offers to copy data to other media.

The Hard Drive Health Monitor window shows the following information about the hard drive:

• Drive health.
• Drive temperature.

The hard drive can be in one of the following states:

• Good – the state corresponding to a new hard drive.
• Normal – there are minor issues with the hard drive.
• Bad – the hard drive state is critical, data loss is possible.

The hard drive temperature range can be one of the following:

• Good – the hard drive is not overheating.
• Normal – the temperature of the hard drive is slightly raised.
• Bad – the hard drive is overheating.

The Drive health history chart shows information about drive health change over the specified period. The maximum displayed period is 1 year.

The Kaspersky application also shows the following statistics about your hard drives:

• Total power-on hours – the total hard drive uptime, in hours.
• Total power cycle count – the total number of power-ons of the hard drive.

The <drive name> S.M.A.R.T. attributes report shows information about the hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. parameter values sorted by severity. Parameter set may vary depending on the manufacturer and model of the hard drive.

To check the current health of your computer's hard drives:

1. Open the main application window.
2. Go to the Performance section.
3. Under Take care of your hard drive and data:
   • If you want to view the graph, click the History button.
   • If you want to view the report, click the Learn more button.

This takes you to the window where you can look at details of your hard drive condition.

How to copy data from a damaged hard drive

If the health of one or more hard drives on your computer got worse and it is no more safe to store data on the drives, the Kaspersky application notifies you and offers you to copy data from these drives to other media.

To copy your data from a damaged hard drive to a good hard drive:

1. Do one of the following:
   • If you receive a notification that the health of the hard drive got worse, click the Learn more button in the notification window.

     The Hard Drive Health Monitor window opens.

   • Click the Copy data button in the Hard Drive Health Monitor window.
2. In the Copy important data window that opens, click the Start button.

   The Select storage window opens.

3. In the Select storage window, select a good hard drive to copy data from the damaged drive.
4. Click the Next button.

   The Select files and folders to copy window opens.

5. Do one of the following:
   • Drag and drop files from Windows Explorer to the highlighted area of the Select files and folders to copy window.
   • Click the select them from the list link.

     In the Explorer window that opens, you can select files and folders to copy to the good hard drive.

6. After adding all the files and folders you want to copy to the list, click the Next button.

   The Creating folder to copy data window opens.

7. Do one of the following:
   • Click the Next button to create a new folder on the selected good hard drive and copy files and folders from the damaged drive to it.
   • Click the Change button to select an existing folder on the good drive and copy files and folders from the damaged drive to it.
8. Do one of the following:
   • If the selected good drive has sufficient disk space to copy selected files and folders, click the Next button to start copying.
   • If the selected good drive has insufficient disk space to copy selected files and folders, click the Back button to select another good drive and try again.
9. When copying is finished, perform one of the following:
   • To open the folder with files copied from the damaged hard drive, click the Open folder button.
   • To close the window, click the Done button.

To copy your data from a damaged hard drive to the Dropbox online storage:

1. Do one of the following:
   • If you receive a notification that the health of the hard drive got worse, click the Learn more button in the notification window.

     The Hard Drive Health Monitor window opens.

   • Click the Copy data button in the Hard Drive Health Monitor window.
2. In the Copy important data window that opens, click the Start button.

   The Select storage window opens.

3. In the Select storage window, select your Dropbox online storage.

   You also can perform one of the following actions:

   • If the storage is not active, click the Activate button.
   • To disable the storage, click the Remove the storage link.
4. Click the Next button.

   The Copying data window opens.

5. Do one of the following:
   • Drag and drop files from Windows Explorer to the highlighted area of the Copying data window.
   • Click the select them from the list link.

     In the Explorer window that opens, you can select files and folders to copy to the Dropbox online storage.

6. After adding all the files and folders you want to copy to the list, click the Start backup button.

   Data copying begins.

7. When copying is finished, perform one of the following:
   • If data backup is completed successfully, click the Done button to close the window.
   • If the application has notified you that backup has failed, free up some space in the Online storage and try again.

There are restrictions on copying data that is stored in OneDrive cloud storage.

Hard Drive Health Monitor limitations

In some cases, the Kaspersky application cannot determine the state of the hard drive due to the following limitations:

• The hard drive does not support S.M.A.R.T technology.
• The S.M.A.R.T. feature is turned off on the hard drive.
• The Kaspersky application does not support:
  • Type of connected hard drive
  • Type of USB controller of the hard drive
• The hard drive is disabled.