Losing a USB drive

[EJK]

Share your (or friends) story of a lost USB flash/hard drive.

I lost one today but I had the data backed up. It sucks to lose it but hey, atleast what's in it is all safe.

Have a nice weekend.

[Ronin]

I haven't lost one (yet) but I do have the shelf of broken dreams at works where all the unbacked up dead hard drives go. I tell you, telling someone that the pictures of their not so long lost granny are now gone burger is not fun.

[oldrider]

Share your (or friends) story of a lost USB flash/hard drive.

I lost one today but I had the data backed up. It sucks to lose it but hey, atleast what's in it is all safe.

Have a nice weekend.

Can you protect the information on those things so that anyone finding it can't access it?

[Headbanger]

I had a couple come into my shop a few years back, The lady was seriously ill so they had used every cent they had to get married and then had a few weeks overseas before the illness took over, They backed up all their photos directly from the camera to a specially designed external harddrive.

When they got home they tried to transfer their pics of their wedding and holiday to a PC, and lo and behold the transfer button was also the delete button and they managed to delete the lot.

They were in tears and she seemed to be near copllapse when I told them there were no pics on the harddrive, all I could do was refer them to a data recovery service.

[Mom]

I haven't lost one (yet) but I do have the shelf of broken dreams at works where all the unbacked up dead hard drives go. I tell you, telling someone that the pictures of their not so long lost granny are now gone burger is not fun.

After my first marraige ended I had some issues with a certain someone coming into the house (we lived rurally, it was never locked) and making sure I knew he had been as he would leave the toilet seat up in the ensuite, cute stuff like that. Paying crashing visits at night and scaring shit out of the kids was another fav game. In the end I took a protection order out. Came home from work one afternoon and turned on my PC. Now I was saving money and had done all the typing for the separation paperwork myself. Many pages of affidavit and the like, and yepper, no back up.

When the thing booted up I had a black screen with a blinking curser in the top left corner of the screen and a white box with words in the middle of the screen. The words went something like, fatal error, blah, blah. I rang my computer guy and he said it was puc-koo, but to bring it in. I told him it may have been a power spike? I said, dont care if you can save nothing, but please, please try to save my divorce folder. Left the box with him the next day and went to work, he rang me. Interesting observation he said, power spikes do not usually cause your internals to break loose from their mountings in the box :pinch: He managed to get it to re-boot and I took it home and ran scandisk. I think it had 68 bad sectors or some such. Totally rooted anyway. Seems someone had decided to give it a bit of a trip to the ground at speed a few times :lol: Funny now, but not back then I can assure you.

He saved my folder for me, I replaced the motherboard, the "a" drive, and a heap of other bits. I dont like USB as back up, they are too little and too easy to misplace, but that is all we have.

[p.dath]

Can you protect the information on those things so that anyone finding it can't access it?

You can buy special keys that use encryption, like IronKeys.

[Taz]

Someone found a usb drive in the contractors carpark at work the other day. Maybe it was yours :)

[taff1954]

Used to use USB drives for convenience when I was working on the drilling rigs, for handing over reports and so on to the company man. Lost 2 working on geothermal wells in Kawerau. Fortunately no critical or sensitive data on them.

Everything at home gets backed up to a grab-and-run external HDD plugged into our wee linux-box server. All the wifes family history files (5 GB + and 15 years of work), our photos and so on get backed to it every day or so. If we have to get out in a hurry, the drive gets yanked out of the housing on the way out the door.

[EJK]

Someone found a usb drive in the contractors carpark at work the other day. Maybe it was yours :)

I found mine this evening cheers. It was under the keyboard. Oh how I laughed.

[bogan]

I found mine this evening cheers. It was under the keyboard. Oh how I laughed.

so did I :laugh:, its a feeling I can relate to

[Sentox]

This Craigslist posting was making the rounds a while ago:

“You Stuck My Flash Drive In Your Vagina” (http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/04/you-stuck-my-flash-drive-in-your-vagina-m4w-25-philadelphia/)

[quickbuck]

I found mine this evening cheers. It was under the keyboard. Oh how I laughed.
LOL,
Started an interesting thread though.....

Yes, my last lap top was getting a bit stuffed.... so when i got my new one I bought a huge external hard drive with it.
As the old lap top was on it's way out, I put all the contents of the hard drive onto my external drive.

All the photos were backed up on disc anyway, as we have been burnt (sorry for the pun) by that before....

So, now, nothing really gets saved to the lap top. It is all backed up as a rule.

As for USB Sticks, well they are banned at work, unless Iron-Key. Can see why.
I have a few floating around the place...... Not that i put anything sensitive on them... but there may well be some Staff In Confidence stuff i am expected to work on after hours...