Top 10 data loss disasters in 2006

Data recovery firm says no matter how bad the loss, there’s a chance for recovery

Data recovery experts worldwide from Minneapolis, Minn.-based Ontrack Data Recovery chimed in for a poll to name the top 10 remarkable data loss disasters in 2006. While the data disasters could have been catastrophic for the companies and their customers, the company reported that all of its top 10 data disasters recovered at least some, if not all, of the lost data for its clients.

10. Helicopter Hi-jinks — Employees of a global telecommunications company dropped a laptop computer while working from a helicopter in Monaco. Vital files on the laptop were retrieved and sent through an FTP server for a meeting in Hong Kong the very next day.

9. Wash the Data Away — On a flight from London to Warsaw, a passenger packed his laptop and toiletries in the same bag. Unfortunately, his shampoo leaked and flooded everything in the bag, including the laptop, causing the hard drive to fail. Engineers had to clean the hard drive and other components in order to get the drive functioning.

8. Not a Jolly Occasion — British comedian Dom Joly, presenter and co-creator of Trigger Happy TV, dropped his laptop, damaging a hard drive that held 5,000 photos, 6,000 songs, half a book he was writing and all of his old newspaper columns. Having read the tragic story in a newspaper column written by Mr. Joly, Ontrack contacted him and was able to recover everything.

7. Rescuing the Research — A leading UK research university suffered a catastrophic data loss after a fire broke out in the computer science department on a weekend morning, damaging computer equipment with smoke and water from the fire department’s efforts. Thirty computers were rescued and more than a terabyte of data recovered.

6. Beware of Bananas — A customer left an old banana on the top of his external hard drive which proceeded to seep its contents into the drive, ruining the circuitry. The drive would no longer run, but was the drive was cleaned and the circuit board repaired so the drive would spin long enough to recover his data.

5. Hard Drive Speed Bump — It happens every year, but people continue to leave computers and hard drives in the path of moving vehicles. This year, data was recovered from a laptop that was run over by a “people mover” at the airport, and more data recovered from several external hard drives stuffed in a backpack that was backed over by a truck.

4. Tenth Time’s the Charm — A man reformatted his hard drive not once, not twice, but 10 times before he realized there was some valuable information he needed recovered.

3. Finding Nemo — A customer returned from the vacation of a lifetime in Barbados to discover that he couldn’t access any of the snorkeling photos he took on his new “waterproof” digital camera. It seems the camera wasn’t as waterproof as advertised, so all of his prized tropical fish photos had to be rescued.

2. Squeaky Drive Gets the Grease — A university professor heard a squeaking noise from the drive of his new desktop computer. To solve the annoying problem, he opened the case and sprayed the inside of the drive with WD-40. Although successful in stopping the drive from squeaking, his actions also prevented the drive from booting up. But the drive was saved and his data recovered.

1. Sock it to Me — Although the circumstances of the original data loss were unremarkable, the problem was intensified when the customer shipped his drive to Ontrack in a pair of dirty socks. The old socks didn’t provide the necessary protection during shipping and the resulting damage made the recovery more challenging than normal. Next time, he’ll stick with bubble wrap.

Ontrack Data Recovery can be found at: www.ontrack.com.