The 18-wheeler carrying my life caught on fire

I had years of work on my computer. I was very diligent to always burn copies of my data to a DVD set. I kept a set of files at my office just in case.

Then my wife got a call from her employer; she was being transferred into a director's position that required us to make a cross-country move. Thankfully, it was a corporate move where all of the moving was done by the pros. We were told we had nothing to worry about.

So I supervised the loading of all of our stuff onto the 18-wheeler in the 114-degree summer heat of Phoenix while my wife was already working in Cleveland. My computers and all of my backups were in the same place. A single point a failure. "What are the chances," I thought. We had been told there was nothing to worry about. All that was left was for me and my dog to fly to our new home and wait for our stuff to catch up with us about a week later.

Three days later, we got a call that there was a problem. A wheel bearing on the trailer had caught fire in Colorado. The contents of the trailer were a total loss.

I will never risk having no backups. And I will never ever have my backups WITH my computer.

Dave Rice

Ants infested my hard drive

About two months ago, I received a panicked phone call from my girlfriend while I was at work. We had recently been having problems with ants in our first-floor apartment, and she had been trying to determine the source.

After a morning of moving furniture and swearing, she figured out that the ants where coming from - behind a shelf in our kitchen that houses all of our networking gear and external drives, and where I charge my MacBook. The weird part is this was an internal wall with no access to the outside. It had been freshly painted, sealing any holes.

But, as she began moving things off the different shelves, more and more ants appeared marching towards our computer equipment. As she picked up my external backup drive, ants and ant eggs began pouring out, which she described as dropping an open bag of rice. They covered her hands, the floor, and my computer. She freaked out, threw the hard drive, and knocked my laptop off its charging shelf onto the floor, destroying both hard drives at the same time.

Apparently, the ants liked the warmth of the hard drive and had made a massive nest inside of it, frying the power supply. I'm still recovering from loosing about 65% of my portfolio, clients' work, and a ton of important documents. Worst of all, ants aren't covered under any warranty program, so if I do want to get my data recovered I will have to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Destructive and disgusting all in one.

Duncan Mowatt, Washington

I took a hammer to the wrong hard drive

When I upgraded to a new machine, I brought over my hard drives from my old machine. One hard drive stored all my documents, music, and pictures, and the other stored the operating system and program files.

Knowing I would install an upgraded version of Windows on my new hard drive, I (with my semi security-conscious/destructive nature) decided to damage the old hard drive with a hammer so that it couldn't be used after I had thrown it away.

It was all well and good until I realized that I destroyed the wrong one...

Jonathan Nachman, London

A burglar stole my laptop and recent honeymoon pictures

My wife and I had been back from our honeymoon for a grand total of three days. It was a great trip; we spent the first half of that week in London, and the second half in Paris. We took a ton of photos.

Digital photography is so liberating. With film, you're careful about which shots you take. Each shot costs money, and you run out of film pretty quickly. But with a large enough memory card in your camera, you can shoot almost forever without running out of space, and every shot is free. With digital, there's absolutely nothing to worry about.

Except this.

We'd been home for three days. My wife was out somewhere, visiting friends. I was at the DMV, renewing my car registration. I got home before she did. The door wasn't locked. "Hmm," I wondered. "I was sure I'd locked that."

I peeked into the kitchen and dining room. Nothing looked amiss. I went upstairs to look around. Most of our dresser drawers were standing open. Some of the drawers were lying on the floor, upside-down. Our clothes had been scattered all over the floor and the bed. My heart rate shot way up.

"Oh, bugger," I said. Except in fact, I used a stronger word than "bugger," and said it more than once.

I ran back downstairs. I peeked into my study, hoping, stupidly, to catch the burglar still at work -- but he was long gone. My computer had gone with him. The power adapter was still there, no longer plugged into anything. Orphaned. The window through which he had entered was still open.

I would eventually have burned the honeymoon photos to a CD, or backed them up to a few zip disks, or whatever media we were using in those days. But we had only been home for three days.

Much of the courtship that led up to that honeymoon took place over e-mail, while my future wife and I were at work. Our love letters were digital, and they were gone forever with that computer. My novel manuscript was backed up, at least. That was one file, so that was easy. All I lost was the most recently written scene, which I had to reconstruct from memory.

During those few days home before the burglary, I had emailed one photo from the honeymoon to a few friends. It was of me sitting in Sherlock Holmes's chair, wearing his deerstalker, smoking his pipe, in the Holmes Museum at 221 Baker Street. It was a low-resolution copy of the original, reduced for easy emailing. A friend was kind enough to email that photo back to me. It's the one photo I still have from my honeymoon.

I cherish it, but I miss the others. And I no longer assume I have all the time in the world to back up my data.

Charles Schoenfeld, Connecticut

My laptop plummeted 100 feet to its death

I recently totaled, for lack of a better word, my entire computer. It was a freakish mishap that may have been more bad luck than just stupidity. I live in a flat about 100 feet above a busy street in Detroit, Michigan. I have a balcony that jets out just slightly over the curb, about 100 feet in the air. The balcony has a railing with a wide 18" platform on top designed to stop a person from falling onto the road below, which would be certain death if it ever happened. I frequently use my laptop on the deck and often just place it on the wide railing. I know, it sounds like I'm asking for trouble but you would have to be a complete idiot to knock your laptop over the edge.

I left the laptop outside to quickly run to the fridge and grab a beverage. Just when I stepped inside, a rather large black crow, with a wingspan of maybe 3 feet, perched itself on the top of my open laptop screen. Worried about the damage his claws might do to the screen I ran back outside waving my arms so the bird would fly away. And fly away it did, but it pushed off of the screen to leap from the computer causing the laptop to flip violently over the balcony ledge. The laptop landed face down and open about a foot from the curb. I'm fairly sure it met its demise initially upon impact of the 10-story fall, but the couple of vehicles that ran over it before I was able to run down and pick it off of the street couldn't have helped either. What's really scary is that I hadn't paid the extra $150 for accident insurance on my laptop!

Josh Diulio, Michigan