« A monster ate my homework. »; « My dog peed on my notebook »… While the excuses of less-than-diligent students at school sometimes struggle to hold up ; the data on storage devices, for their part, live through real traumas, which for once seem to flirt with fiction.
This ranking gathers astonishing experiences lived, for some of them, by the engineers at CHRONODISK.
Note that, for each of the unusual situations recounted, the data was recovered every single time !
1- Kamikaze computer on board a helicopter
Employees of an international telecoms group accidentally dropped a laptop from a helicopter aboard which they were working in Monaco. Expert technicians managed to recover the vital data from the computer, which could then be sent to Hong Kong, where a meeting was being held the next day.
2- An event less funny than expected
Silicon.fr
British comedian Dom Joly, presenter and co-creator of a famous show called ‘Trigger Happy TV’, dropped his laptop, damaging the hard drive that held five thousand photos, six thousand songs, half of the book he was writing, and all of his press archives. Having read this tragic story in one of Mr. Joly’s columns, experts contacted the comedian and managed to recover all of his data.
3- A good scrub for the data
Silicon.fr
On a flight between London and Warsaw, a passenger packed his laptop and his toiletries in the same suitcase. Unfortunately, the shampoo leaked and spilled everywhere, including onto the hard drive. In order to recover all of the data, the technicians also had to give the hard drive a thorough clean…
4- The roasted laptop
Before leaving on vacation, in case his house were burgled, a man had the bright idea of hiding his laptop in the kitchen oven. In the meantime, his wife preheated the oven to cook a chicken for a picnic during the trip. The result: just like the chicken, the laptop’s hard drive was well and truly grilled, but the data was nonetheless saved.
5- Terry Pratchett: his unfinished novels crushed by a steamroller
A hard drive containing the unpublished works of the British writer, who died in 2015, was demolished under the destructive pressure of a piece of construction equipment. His friend and biographer, Rob Wilkins, announced the news on Twitter, stating that this act was indeed «in keeping with the author’s wishes». «An old steam roller, ten unpublished novels, and here I am facing quite a few problems», he declared on the social network.
WHAT ABOUT YOU ?! Have you lost your data in extreme circumstances ?
Coming up soon, part 2 of the “Top 5 most unusual data losses !”