Hard drives today are still used in the majority of today's computers and remain a good solution for data storage. For most of us, a hard drive is a "black box" that somehow stores information and will work without problems and will never lead to data loss. Everything that has a beginning also has an end and that also applies to a hard drive, one of the most important parts of a computer, since we store valuable information on such drives. Therefore, problems with hard drives can cause serious data loss, performance degradation that is often costly.  The purpose of this work to identify the causes of data loss. Research has shown that the most common causes of data loss are mechanical problems with the hard drive as a result of human error. The conclusion to avoid data loss is to handle hard drives carefully and perhaps the most important is to have a good backup for their data.