Data Disasters

Good morning, just a quick post today about 2005’s top 10 data disasters. In a press release yesterday Ontrack, a data recovery company announced their top 10 most bizarre/funny data disasters for this year:

10. A PhD candidate lost his entire thesis when a power spike frazzled his USB pen drive, luckily for him Ontrack recovered it (power spikes frying hardware? I thought that happened a lot).

9. A woman accidentally dropped a five-pound clay pot on here laptop’s hard drive, nearly losing a book she’d been working on for half a decade (not really funny, bizarre or amusing).

8. A husband deleted all of the pictures of his newborn baby by pressing the wrong button, needless to say his wife went nuts (again, not really funny, bizarre or amusing).

7. A man’s memory stick was used as a chew by his dog, but the data was recovered despite the teeth marks (your dog ate it? Pull the other one).

6. One guy attempted to recover data off his own hard drive, giving up half way through he sent Ontrack the disassembled disk in a collection of separate baggies (I bet that happens quite a lot- seeing as data recovery costs a fortune).

5. A clock maker suffered from a system meltdown, losing the designs for his new clocks (nothing unusual here).

4. When recovering a multi-drive RAID (random array of inexpensive disks), engineers noticed that a disk was missing. Shortly afterwards the customer found the missing disk in the trash with a hole drilled through it-in accordance with his companies policies (another case of too much red tape, or idiot IT technicians).

3. The Minnesota Twins baseball team now relies upon the services of Ontrack after a senior executive nearly lost crucial scouting records (sounds like a normal disk recovery story to me).

2. A writer attacked her PC with a hammer; engineers could clearly see a hammer imprint on the machine’s case (no surprise there).

1. A customer hoped to recover data from a laptop that had been sitting in a warehouse for a decade. When engineer’s opened up the notebook that time forgot, they were confronted by the husks of hundreds of dead or dying cockroaches (finally, a bizarre story!).

Now you’ll have to excuse my ignorance. The title of the press release this was taken from was Unbelievable but True Tales of Data Disaster and Remarkable Feats of Data Recovery. In my opinion the only unbelievable (and remotely interesting) point in this rather dire top 10 is point 1. Man, I hate cockroaches, so I guess its lucky there aren’t any here in Wales. I know that data recovery is far from the most interesting of businesses but surely they could have mustered up a better top 10 than that, or failing that just released the number 1 most bizarre case.

Sorry for subjecting you to such a boring top 10

DWB