PLOP! With that sound - and a splash - in went your thumb drive into a cup of coffee.

Ten seconds of horrified numbness follows before you react. Aaargh!

As Murphy's Law would have it, the same mishaps could happen to larger and more precious tech aids - from digicams to laptops.

You never expected it, but, hey, that's why it's called an accident. Then again, sometimes it's sheer carelessness bordering on abuse.

In this package, Digital Life presents the findings of simple tests carried out to determine if data can be recovered from computer disks damaged in various ways.

The experiments are based on real-life scenarios that executives or students may have encountered as they move about with their laptops.

For good measure - and some entertainment value too - the team also took the liberty to design methods of extreme abuse. Here's the plan:

Drown a 2GB USB drive in coffee for one minute. (One minute is about the time you take to recover from shock, walk to the sink and empty your cup.)

Drown a 2GB USB drive in water for one minute.

Throw a 2.5 inch external hard disk down a flight of stairs three times. The fourth time, it got kicked down the stairs for good measure.

Run a 2.4 litre (1,700kg) Toyota Estima multi-purpose vehicle over a 2.5 inch external hard disk twice (once forward, once back). After that, the disk got hammered seven times on an uneven granite floor.

Before the hard drives were thrashed, each of them was loaded with 1.1GB of data.

Information was stored in folder hierarchies of up to 10 levels. File types were varied. Each disk contained all kinds of files from JPEG images and MPEG videos to Word and PDF documents and Powerpoint presentations.

The damaged disks were then sent to the local offices of professional data recovery services firms, US-headquartered Kroll Ontrack and Singapore-based Adroit Data Recovery Centre (ADRC), for rescue work.

No operating system was loaded on the disks due to time constraints. Also, the 2.5 inch hard disks were from different manufacturers as they were supplied by the data rescue firms.

As with all things extreme and dangerous, do not try this at home.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on 27 May 2008.