Data Loss Disasters - Planes, Cars, and Other Travel Mishaps
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Somehow, transportation and computers often don’t mix well. Pity the poor laptop that belonged to an employee for a global telecommunications company. While being used in a helicopter flying over Monaco, it fell out of the vehicle. This could have been a major catastrophe, as there were files on it that were needed for a meeting in Hong Kong the next day.
In another case, a salesman in a hurry to get to his next assignment put all his samples back in his car, but forgot about his laptop…which he left on the roof of the vehicle. He then drove off. By the time it fell off the roof and he saw it in his rear view mirror, he was doing about 40 mph.
One owner of an MP3 player can probably relate to the salesman’s problem. She drove over the device, not realizing it had fallen out of her pocket before she got into her car.
Cars and helicopters aren’t the only offending vehicles. Ontrack said it has recovered data from a laptop that was run over by a “people mover” at the airport, and also from several external hard drives that were in a backpack that was run over by a truck.
Of course, we need at least one plane story to round out this batch. A passenger flying from London to Warsaw packed his toiletries and his laptop in the same bag. Frequent travelers can easily guess what happened next: the shampoo leaked and flooded the entire bag, including the laptop, causing the hard drive to fail. The data was recovered, but the hard drive and the laptop’s other components had to be physically cleaned to do so.
Here’s one last travel story to help you feel the pain of those who have lost precious data that can’t be duplicated. Imagine taking a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Barbados. Imagine going snorkeling and getting all sorts of wonderful pictures of the exotic marine life with your waterproof digital camera. Now imagine coming back and discovering your digital camera was not as waterproof as advertised. This really happened to one of Ontrack’s clients; the company helped him to find Nemo and all of the other photos he snapped on that trip.
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