Data Loss Disasters - Animals and Acts of Nature
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We love our pets, but sometimes they’re responsible for the worst kinds of heartbreak. Teachers never believe it when students say that their dog ate their homework, but electronic devices are another matter entirely. One company had to recover data from a camera that had been mistaken for a chew toy by a bull terrier. The memory card inside the camera took some damage from the rough treatment, and still had some dog saliva on it.
One wonders if this particular short-sightedness is in the nature of the beast. Another data recovery company was faced with a memory stick that had received similar treatment from the owner’s dog. The stick had teeth marks all over it and a hole that went completely through the device. Even so, that was probably not as annoying to negotiate as the Toshiba laptop that was mistaken by the owner’s Persian blue cat for a litter box.
Stretching the animal point a bit, sometimes you can get pretty desperate when it comes to recovering data. One Ontrack customer needed data from a laptop that had been sitting unused in a warehouse for 10 years. When engineers got to the machine and opened it, they found that cockroaches had gotten there first. Lots of cockroaches, in fact; the laptop contained literally hundreds of husks.
Then there are other rather dramatic disasters that you can’t prevent. One leading UK research university’s computers faced the fury of the elements when a fire broke out in the computer science department. Smoke, fire, and water from the fire department threatened 30 computers and more than a terabyte of data. If that’s not dramatic enough for you, how about a run-in with oil – lots of oil? One client of Disklabs was using his laptop on an oil rig, and saw 120 barrels of crude oil spilled over the device.
Something as simple as a bad power supply can cause a major crisis. One PhD student lost his entire dissertation to this very problem. The dissertation was actually on a USB flash drive, but the flash drive was attached to the computer when the supply suddenly zapped his PC. If the data had not been recovered, the student would not have graduated. Another potentially painful loss of data happened when a clockmaker’s system fried, causing the company to lose the digital designs for all its clocks. Fortunately, the data was recovered just before an important international trade show.
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