Published at LXer:

Whether you're a home user or a system/network administrator at a large site, monitoring your system helps you in ways you possibly do not know yet. For example, you have important work-related documents on your laptop and one fine day, the hard drive decides to die on you without even saying goodbye. Since most users don't make backups, you'll have to call your boss and tell him the latest financial reports are gone. Not nice. But if you used a regularly started (at boot or with cron) disk monitoring and reporting piece of software, like smartd for example, it will tell you when your drive(s) start to become weary. Between us, though, a hard drive may decide to go belly up without warning, so backup your data.

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