Strange tales of data recovery
Moral: back up often!

It only takes one computer crash to teach the value of backing up. When a hard drive crashes on your personal computer, it is bad enough. But, when it happens on your business system, the consequences can be disastrous.

Sometimes data can be restored — at a price, of course.

Here are some of the strangest and funniest data recovery stories a data recovery company has compiled — listed à la David Letterman:

10. PhD almost an F. A PhD candidate lost his entire dissertation when a bad power supply suddenly zapped his computer and damaged the USB flash drive that stored the document.

Had the data not been recovered, the student would not have graduated.

9. Suffering from art. While rearranging her home office, a woman accidentally dropped a five pound piece of clay pottery on her laptop, directly onto the hard drive area that contained a book she’d been working on for five years and 150 year-old genealogy pictures that had not yet been printed.

8. Domestic dilemma. A husband deleted all of his child’s baby pictures when he accidentally hit the wrong button on his computer. His wife hinted at divorce if he did not get the pictures back.

7. Bite worse than bark. A customer left his memory stick lying out and his dog mistook it for a chew toy. All of the data was recovered, despite teeth marks all over the stick and a hole that went completely through.

6. Bagged. A man attempting to recover data from his computer on his own found the job too challenging mid-way through and ended up sending the recovery company his completely disassembled drive — with each of its parts in a separate baggie.

5. Out of time. A clockmaker suffered a system meltdown, losing the digital designs for all of its clocks. The data recovery company literally beat the clock by recovering all the data just in time for an important international tradeshow.

4. Drilling for data. During a multi-drive RAID recovery, engineers discovered one drive that belonged in the set was missing. The customer found the missing drive in a dumpster, but in compliance with company policy for disposing of old drives, it had a hole drilled through it. Despite this, the data was recovered.

3. Safe at home. After one of its executives experienced a laptop crash, the Minnesota Twins professional baseball team called the recovery company to rescue crucial scouting information about their latest prospects.

2. Hardware problems. A frustrated writer attacked her computer with a hammer. When the engineers received the computer, the hammer imprint was clearly visible on the top cover.

And finally, the most bizarre data disaster …

1. La cucaracha. In hopes of rescuing valuable company information, a customer pulled an old laptop out of a warehouse where it had been sitting unused for 10 years. When engineers opened the computer, it contained hundreds of husks of dead and decaying cockroaches.

Source: Ontrack Data Recovery, www.ontrack.com