Ontrack, a company that helps people recover data they have damaged or erased, has listed the ten most unusual data-loss cases their engineers have encountered in 2007. However, the company claims that they were able to recover the data in each of the cases cited below.

Here the list in decending order( Sounds incredible? very funny).

10. All washed up - This year, a woman called the engineers at Kroll Ontrack complaining she had “washed all her data away.” Her USB stick had been through a cycle in her washing machine and unsurprisingly she couldn’t retrieve any data from it.

9. Doting Dad - Rushing home from work to feed his baby daughter, an over-enthusiastic father forgot about the USB stick in his top pocket. As he lent over the high-chair, the device fell in a dish of sticky apple puree.

8. Taking the bait - A fisherman thought that he would take his laptop out on his rowing boat to play a few games while waiting for a bite. As he stood up, both he and the laptop went overboard, taking all his data to the bottom of the lake.

7. Panicked photographer - A wedding photographer faced the potential wrath of a new bride when he discovered he had overwritten her photos with those from another event. Two days before the couple returned from their honeymoon, he called Kroll Ontrack for help. The bride was none the wiser.

6. Acid trip - A scientist spilled acid on an external hard drive during an experiment. Thinking all the data had been burned, he called in the experts who were able to successfully recover the data on the drive.

5. Business brawl - In the heat of an argument in Australia, a businessman threw a USB stick at his partner. Containing valuable company plans, the stick ended up in several pieces on the floor. Luckily, both the plans and the business relationship were salvaged.

4. Indiscriminate inferno - Recently, a fire destroyed the majority of the contents of an office, only leaving a few CDs. The sticking point was they had melted to the inside of their cases – a unique job for the engineers.

3. Quest for a quiet life - A British scientist was fed up with his hard drive squeaking, so he drilled a hole through the casing and poured oil into the mechanics. The squeaking stopped, and so did the hard drive.

2. Parachute mishap - In an effort to test the functionality of a parachute, a camera (acting as the cargo) was dropped from a plane. Unfortunately, the parachute failed its test and the fragile cargo shattered into several pieces. With the help of Kroll Ontrack, the camera’s memory stick was reassembled and the video of the parachute’s demise was recovered.

And finally, the number one most remarkable data disaster of 2007…

1. Ant invasion - Discovering ants had taken up residence in his external hard drive, a photographer in Thailand took the cover off and sprayed the interior with insect repellent. The ants didn’t make it and until Kroll Ontrack’s engineers got their hands on it, it looked like the data wasn’t going to either.

Virtual Hard Disk ¦ Thanks Ben.

Labels: Data-loss, data-recover, disaster recovery