Bizarre Data Loss: What’s Your Story?


Computer users have lost data under very bizarre circumstances.

As data storage technology expands to accommodate business production - including email histories, company records and research - digital data forms a large part of a company’s backbone. In one famous case, an employee left a rotting banana on an external hard drive, which seeped into the mechanism and compromised all of his saved data. Do you have a messy desk? Don’t leave your lunch on your computer because even breadcrumbs can jam the tiny mechanisms that make the drive run.

When a data storage medium is crammed with photograph albums, Mp3 music and private records or calendars, it’s a big part of our personal lives, too. And we take it with us everywhere. If you’re clumsy, don’t leave a cup of coffee within an arm’s reach of your hard drive. Liquids and oils will almost certainly make your data too slippery to handle. Nevertheless one person greased his hard drive with mechanical grease because it was squeaking!

Pack your belongings for travel with care. Don’t slide toiletries into your laptop bag and risk spilled shampoo on your personal or professional hard drive. Every year, data recovery firms receive hard drives that have been left in the path of moving vehicles. At the airport, laptop bags and external devices have been crushed under luggage carriers. Don’t drop your laptop, ever. Not from a high counter, a moving car, over a balcony, or - and this really happened - from a helicopter. Remember that digital data - although recoverable in all of the instances above - is easily lost.

Protect your data and save yourself plenty of personal and professional trouble.