Bananas and more data disasters

Not even (admittedly minor) celebrities are immune from losing precious data stored on their hard drives. Comedian Dom Joly, the brains behind Trigger Happy TV, dropped his laptop and thought he'd lost the text of a book he was writing as well as 5,000 photographs.

Fortunately for him, help was at hand. Data recovery specialists Ontrack helped Mr Joly get his data back.

It seems that you don't have to be slightly famous to get help either. A man who had left a banana on the top of his external hard drive was able to call on the company to recover his data after the warm banana-sludge seeped into the drive, ruining it.

Every year Ontrack lists the ten best - or worst, depending on how you look at it - tales of data loss woe. Happily, the stories all end well. For example, a leading UK research university suffered a fire and the water and foam the fire brigade used added to the problem of the fried circuitry. However, Ontrack was able to recover over one terabyte (1,000GB) of data.

The stories range from the unfortunate to the downright stupid. One man reformatted his hard drive 10 times before realising there was some data on it he needed. Ontrack managed to recover the data.

"Individuals and companies can avoid the hassle and stress [accidents] can cause by backing up data on a regular basis,” said Phil Bridge, managing director at Ontrack.

http://www.ontrack.co.uk/

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