Software as a Service (SaaS)

The Ten Worst Data Mishaps of 2007

Posted by Ben Worthen

Each year, Ontrack, a company that helps people recover data they’ve damaged or erased, releases a list of the ten most unusual data-loss cases their engineers have encountered. The company says it was able to recover the data in each of the cases below. Sure, it’s blatant promotion, but the list is too fun not to pass along.

10. A woman couldn’t get the data off of her USB memory stick after she put it through the washing machine.

9. Proving that USB sticks are an accident waiting to happen, one of the devices fell out of a new dad’s pocket and into his baby daughter’s bowl of apple puree.

8. A fisherman brought his laptop with him on his boat so he could play computer games while he fished. No surprise: The laptop ended up at the bottom of the lake.

7. A photographer accidentally wrote over the photos he took at a wedding with photos from another event. Ontrack says he didn’t call for help until two days before the couple returned from their honeymoon.

6. During an experiment, a scientist spilled acid on his hard drive.

5. A USB stick containing important documents shattered when an Australian businessman threw it at his partner as part of an argument.

4. A fire destroyed an office, leaving only a few melted CDs worth of data that had melted to their cases.

3. A British scientist tried to quiet a squeaky hard drive by drilling a hole in and pouring in oil. As Ontrack says, “the squeaking stopped, and so did the hard drive.”

2. A parachute that was supposed to deliver a camera gently to earth failed to open, and of course the camera shattered on impact. But engineers were able to recover video of the drop.

1. A photographer in Thailand found a colony of ants living in his hard drive so he sprayed it with insect repellant, killing his drive along with the ants.

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