I have more data loss horror stories than you can imagine. One that stands out in my mind is the TiVo Desktop photo and music wipe. When the ability to stream one's photos and MP3s from a PC out to a Series 2 TiVo was brand new, a bug in an early version of the software caused each photo and music file to be deleted from the PC hard drive after it was viewed or played on the TiVo. I didn't discover this until we had been playing with the feature for weeks, and by then they weren't retrievable by any data recovery software. We lost all of the photos we had taken at the wedding of our friends Maureen and Ed, plus I'm sure many more that I never noticed were missing. And I don't even know how many MP3s I lost. This was several years ago, and to this day I occasionally go hunting in my music collection for a song I'm sure I have, only to find I don't have it - on some of these I've probably just been mistaken, but I'm sure at least a few of them were victims to the TiVo disaster.
There's also the more recent incident wherein I lost all of my Sims 2 game files due to a combination of overzealous copy protection and my own airheadedness. The copy protection software that came with the most recent expansion pack would not recognize the game disc, and I followed a suggestion I'd found in an online forum to uninstall and reinstall the expansion, forgetting that the uninstall would also delete my game files, and I should back them up first. As much as some people might make fun of me for this, I had emotional attachments to many of the characters I had developed in the game, and I still miss them. I have yet to develop that kind of connection with any of the new characters I am playing now.
If you have any data loss horror stories of your own, Sumo Backup, a company offering online backups, is giving away $10 gift cards to Best Buy for any submitted story that they choose to publish on their blog!
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