What were they thinking?

The engineers at Ontrack Data Recovery have compiled their annual list of the top data disaster mishaps.  Read on for five of Ontrack’s most remarkable 2007 recoveries: 1. A woman called Ontrack Data Recovery engineers 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. 2. A fisherman thought that he would take his laptop along to play a few games whilst waiting for a bite in his rowing boat. As he stood up, both he and the laptop went overboard, taking all his data to the bottom of the lake.3. A fire destroyed the majority of the contents of an office, leaving only a few CDs. The sticking point was they had melted to the inside of their cases – a unique job for the engineers.4. 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.5. 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 Ontrack Data Recovery engineers got their hands on it, it looked like the data wasn’t going to make it either. Visit  www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.au for more information on data recovery.