Importance of back up

Mistreatment of laptops also featured highly on the list, with one dropped from a helicopter, another given an unnecessary wash from a leaking shampoo bottle, while several were run over.

In another incident, a customer left an old banana on the top of his external hard drive which proceeded to seep its contents and ruin the circuitry.

OnTrack receives thousands of requests each year for help in finding information lost through damaged computer hardware.

In all cases, the data was recovered from these potentially fatal situations.

Losing data can be incredibly frustrating and has become more of an issue as people increasingly store photos, songs and other vital information on their computers.

"No matter how catastrophic the situation may seem, it pays to have your hard drive or storage device evaluated by a professional service because chances are good that we'll be successful in recovering critical data regardless of how it was lost in the first place," said Phil Bridge, managing director of Ontrack UK.

One of the firm's customers this year was comedian Dom Joly.

He dropped his laptop and damaged a hard drive containing 5,000 photos, 6,000 songs and half a book he was writing. He wrote about the disaster in a newspaper column and was contacted by OnTrack, who successfully recovered the data.

"Individuals and companies can avoid the hassle and stress this can cause by backing up data on a regular basis," said Mr Bridge.