Oil a slick solution to noisy hard disk?

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 18 Dec 2007 at 10:12

Losing data is no laughing matter, unless it happens to someone else, of course. Data recovery expert, Kroll Ontrack, has come across a series of bizarre cases that show the HMRC aren't the only ones to have suffered data disasters in 2007.

One scientist's technology-DIY went awry when he tried to silence his noisy hard disk - he drilled a hole in the top and oiled the components. Needless to say, he successfully silenced the drive.

Oil wasn't the only strange substance to ruin a hard disk. An external drive in Thailand became an unusual habitat for ants, so its owner opened up the case and blasted it with insect repellent. Little did he know that insect repellent is just as harmful to data as insects.

USB flash drives have exploded in popularity over the past couple of years, but the fact that Ontrack is seeing more of them in its labs proves that they're not as indestructible as some think. One woman this year called engineers complaining that she had "washed all her data away", and she wasn't kidding: she had accidentally put it through a cycle in her washing machine.

Ontrack was also literally left to pick up the pieces when a camera recording a parachute drop was smashed to smithereens when the parachute failed to open. The Ontrack lab somehow managed to piece the memory card back together and recover the data.

Perhaps this year's most grateful customer, though, was the man whose career was saved when engineers managed to retrieve wedding photos from a memory card. The man was a wedding photographer, who had overwritten one customer's images with pictures from another couple's nuptials.

The moral of these stories? Back-up your files. And don't oil your hard disk.