On-Track has released their annual report on the top ten data disasters. It is a serious business, and OnTrack has built quite a reputation for saving the day(ta):

10. PhD Almost an F – A PhD candidate lost his entire dissertation when a bad power supply suddenly zapped his computer and damaged the USB Flash drive that stored the document. Had the data not been recovered, the student would not have graduated.

He must have been in a state of shock — “Teacher, the electricity ate my homework”.

4. Drilling for Data – During a multi-drive RAID recovery, engineers discovered one drive belonging in the set was missing. The customer found the missing drive in a dumpster, but in compliance with company policy for disposing of old drives, it had a hole drilled through it.

Can we please see the top tep without the remarkable recoveries included (just the failures)? That would be more interesting, I think. Or, as the infamous WWII story goes, if you are going to better-protect your pilots you should review planes that were shot down rather than just the ones that returned.