Ontrack Data Recovery™, the largest, most experienced and most technologically advanced provider of data recovery products and services in the world, has unveiled its annual Top Ten list of remarkable data loss disasters in 2006. Taken from a global poll of Ontrack data recovery experts, this year’s list of data disasters is even more incredible when you consider that in every case cited, Ontrack successfully recovered the data.

The Ontrack 2006 Top Ten 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 very 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 five thousand photos, six thousand 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 Mr. 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 thirty 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.

To read the next Top 5  amazing data recovery stories, including the one about the university professor who sprayed WD-40 inside his squeeky hard dive (ya, I can't believe that one either!!!) check out the full article right here.