Data Disasters Accidents

For those of you who are on Facebook, you have probably already been asked to join a group something along the lines of “Cindy’s cell fell in the loo, please email your phone numbers”. If you haven’t seen similar groups, then you probably have heard similar stories. People put their phones in their back pockets, only for them to fall out when they are getting up from the toilet. It’s not only cell-phones that are losing their numbers through odd mishaps, but other forms of data as well.

Gareth, from Cape Town, South Africa, had just received his first 2GB memory stick. Although 2GB are fairly common today, when he received it, it was still state of the art hardware. Part of the appeal was that the memory stick was waterproof. His friends didn’t think so.

On Friday night, at the bar, they decided to test if the memory stick was indeed waterproof. In theory, if it was waterproof then it should be beer proof as well. Much to Gareth’s dismay as he watched his friends pop the memory stick in a draft, it turned out that it wasn’t. Luckily Gareth was able to recover his data, but the memory stick died of alcohol poisoning.

Kroll data recovery specialists have marked some of the strangest stories that they received over the last year from people requesting data recovery from them. One story is of a woman who literally washed her data away when she left her memory stick in her pocket and popped it in the washing machine. She realised after the first cycle as she noticed the USB stick rotating amongst her clothes. One wash and the stick was cleaned off all data.

Another person who was unable to retrieve his data was a local fisherman who took his laptop onboard with him. He was passing the time by playing a few games, when a fish starting biting the line. In his enthusiasm, he jumped up making the boat unstable. Both him and his laptop went plummeting overboard into the lake.

A photographer had a career panic when he realised that he had overwritten wedding photos with other photos from another event. Fortunately the photos were recovered, without seeing the full wrath of the bride.

However, businessmen in Australia weren’t so lucky. In a heated argument, a businessman threw his USB stick at his partner. The memory stick, which held the company plans and other vital documents, fell to the floor in several pieces.

Proving that science isn’t always the answer, two different scientists managed to kill their hard drives in two different ways. The first accidentally poured acid onto his, instantly killing the drive. The second got annoyed with the squeaking noises coming from the hard drive, so decided to drill a little hole into the hard drives casing. He then proceeded to pour oil through the oil. The squeaking stopped, but so did the hard drive.

For some unfortunate workers, a fire destroyed their office, burning the majority of the contents and damaging most of their systems. To their glee they discovered that a few CDs had survived the flames. In an unfortunate turn of events, upon opening the CD cases, they discovered that the heat had caused the CDs to melt onto the inside of their cases.

In a rather frustrating event, researchers decided to test the functionality of a parachute by attaching a camera to the parachute. When the parachute failed to open, the camera smashed into several pieces, destroying the test results.

According to Kroll, their strangest story was one from Thailand. A man had discovered that ants had decided to live in his external hard drive. Acting on impulse, he took the cover off the hard drive and sprayed the entire interior with insect repellent. The insects passed on and so did the hard drive, until the data recovery specialists got hold of it.

Celeste does writing for Data Recovery Resource, which is the number one site for data recovery information.