Kroll Ontracks Top 10 Data Disasters and Remarkable Recoveries of 2009

by Chris Preimesberger

As legal officials entered the home of a criminal suspect, the individual in question threw a laptop containing potentially pertinent evidence out the window of a 12-story building. As a result, the laptop smashed into many pieces on the sidewalk. No matter; Kroll recovered photos, videos and e-mails.

A hard drive plummeted 200 feet to the ocean’s floor. It was discovered six months later and was sent to Kroll’s clean room, where 99 percent of the data was imaged and recovered.

A horse riding tour ended abruptly with a fall. The rider was wearing a camera at the time of the accident, and while the rider got a clean bill of health, the memory card did not. The files were corrupted and could not be uploaded to the owner’s computer. After two other failed attempts, the photos were recovered.

After a house pet got into a piece of defrosting meat on a kitchen countertop, the pet became sick on none other than the family’s computer. The dinner remnants seeped into the laptop’s hard drive, ruining the family’s computer in addition to the dinner to be. Messy, but data was recovered.

While riding on his motorbike, a photographer’s bike basket containing his camera came loose. The camera flew out and broke, leaving the memory card drowning in a puddle. No problem on the recovery.

As a result of a brawl between two colleagues, a server fell off a server rack in a server room. Lucky for them, the business-critical information was recovered in full.

A businessman running late for a meeting made the mistake of placing his laptop on the roof of his car and drove off in a rush. As he turned a corner, the laptop flew through the air, crashing into a wall. Ontrack engineers were able to repair the broken drive and recover the individual’s laptop data.

Somehow a laptop was dropped from the second floor of a business operation. Sent initially to another data recovery company, the data was deemed unrecoverable. A second opinion yielded different, more promising results.

When a family house cat decided to replace a game of cat and mouse by playing with the AC power cord, it ended poorly. The cord was attached to an external USB HDD, which of course fell, rendering household financial information and memories unreadable. The data was recovered.

A customer reformatted an SD card by accident, erasing one particularly important photo. The photo in question was from a recent trip, where the customer helped capture a breath-taking scenic photo for a stranger, who forgot to bring a camera. The customer promised to e-mail the photo when the customer returned home. Kroll helped the customer keep their word.