DUBAI, 21 November 2006 — One of the largest, most experienced and most technologically advanced providers of data recovery products and services in the world, Ontrack Data Recovery, has unveiled its 2006 Top 10 list of ridiculous data loss disasters. In every case, Ontrack was called in and managed to successfully recover the data.

The list was compiled from a global poll of Ontrack data recovery experts. The list also shows that even when people think they’ve deleted data, those bits and bytes are probably still there. That’s something to consider when disposing of devices such as mobile handsets, PDAs and PCs.

The Ontrack 2006 Top 10 List of Data Disasters and Remarkable Recoveries:

10. Helicopter Hi-jinks — Employees of a global telecommunications company dropped a laptop computer while working from a helicopter in Monaco. Ontrack successfully retrieved vital files on the laptop and sent them through an FTP server for a meeting in Hong Kong the next day.

9. Wash the Data Away — On a flight from London to Warsaw, a passenger packed his laptop and toiletries in the same bag. Unfortunately, his shampoo leaked and flooded everything in the bag, including the laptop, causing the hard drive to fail. In order to recover all of the data, Ontrack engineers had to do some washing of their own — cleaning the hard drive and other components in order to get the drive functioning.

8. Not a Jolly Occasion — British comedian Dom Joly, presenter and co-creator of Trigger Happy TV, dropped his laptop, damaging a hard drive that held 5,000 photos, 6,000 songs, half a book he was writing and all of his old newspaper columns. Having read the tragic story in a newspaper column written by Joly, Ontrack contacted him and was able to recover everything.

7. Rescuing the Research — A leading UK research university suffered a catastrophic data loss after a fire broke out in the computer science department on a weekend morning, damaging computer equipment with smoke and water from the fire department’s efforts. Ontrack was called onsite to rescue 30 computers and recovered more than a terabyte of data.

6. Beware of Bananas — A customer left an old banana on the top of his external hard drive which proceeded to seep its contents into the drive, ruining the circuitry. The drive would no longer run, but Ontrack was able to clean the drive and repair the circuit board so the drive would spin long enough to recover his data. The banana, however, could not be recovered.

5. Hard Drive Speed Bump — It happens every year, but people continue to leave computers and hard drives in the path of moving vehicles. This year alone, Ontrack recovered data from a laptop that was run over by a “people mover” at the airport, and recovered data from several external hard drives stuffed in a backpack that was backed over by a truck.

4. Tenth Time’s the Charm — A man reformatted his hard drive not once, not twice, but 10 times before he realized there was some valuable information he needed recovered. It only took Ontrack one try to recover the information.

3. Finding Nemo — A customer returned from the vacation of a lifetime in Barbados to discover that he couldn’t access any of the snorkeling photos he took with his new “waterproof” digital camera. It seems the camera wasn’t as waterproof as advertised, so Ontrack had to rescue all of his prized tropical fish photos.

2. Squeaky Drive Gets the Grease — A university professor heard a squeaking noise from the drive of his new desktop computer. To solve the annoying problem, he opened the case and sprayed the inside of the drive with WD-40. Although successful in stopping the drive from squeaking, his actions also prevented the drive from booting up. Ontrack got the drive working again and recovered his data.

1. Sock it to Me — Although the circumstances of the original data loss were unremarkable, the problem was intensified when the customer shipped his drive to Ontrack wrapped in a pair of dirty socks. The old socks didn’t provide the necessary protection during shipping and the resulting damage made the recovery more challenging than normal.