Closest call? When my parents' house got hit by lightning and the attic (where I lived) caught fire. I stood outside on the sidewalk watching flames shoot out of the window, and my heart sank as I realized my computer was in the attic, and my floppies with all my backup files were sitting on the desk beside it. I cried. Then I realized our cats were still in the house, and I cried even harder.
Fortunately, the fire station was just a block away, so they were able to put the fire out quickly. The cats were found hiding under the bed, protected from the smoke by the bed's dust ruffle. My floppies were damaged by smoke, but I was able to copy them over before they died. All's well that ends well. . . .
A separate, but related story--when I lived with my parents, my PC regularly died. Every six to twelve months, zap! Apparently, my father has some kind of excess static electricity in his body that kills laptops and computers and electronic equipment. I don't think he realizes why his computers are always dying. And he doesn't know how to salvage files off them, he just does a wipe and reinstalls Windows. Anyway, once I got married and moved out, I stopped losing my computers every year. Unfortunately, a lot of my early stories were saved on 3.5" floppies which mysteriously vanished when I moved out. I still have print-outs of some of them, but I lost all of the letters I'd written back and forth with my high school sweetheart, among other things.
They say you ought to back up daily, using at least three different methods, at least one of which is off-site. So, I email my files to myself, I use a thumb drive, plus an external hard drive, and Amazon's free backup Cloud Drive. Cloud is the easiest, I just drag the files over and it copies them. The others take more effort, so they don't get done as frequently.
