I guess this pertains . . . in grad school I lost of lot of my work because my laptop was so slow and old and I'd be working in a big program like Adobe Illustrator and I'd go to save and it would crash and lose all my work. But I had only "personal" deadlines at that point so it was never an excuse, I just had to buckle up and start over .

i have never not been able to hand something in because of it, but i have certainly had to re-do work that was lost due to a computer freeze or forgetting to save something.

when writing my thesis, i would always always ALWAYS email a copy to myself when i'd completed a new section or at the end of every day..i would have a million emails from myself with huge files but it was worth it to know that if i lost my USB key or my laptop died or was stolen i'd still have something to work off of

I lost a lab report that I had been working on last spring when my hard drive crashed, about an hour before it was due. So I couldn't finish it in time. THAT was upsetting. But luckily, free to fix, thank you AppleCare!

back in the day when our film festival was taking care of it's own web site (we have a company do it for us now), we were working late one night and our co-director deleted the website. thank goodness for the mac guy in wilmington, we got it back

I know better than to not save at intervals, but I was trying to finish something on a deadline and just as I was finishing up the computer ate it and I couldn't retrieve it. I wrote my teacher a tearful email and called it a night. It seems my computer always needs to do silly things like run updates when I'm late to class.

if by home work you mean my hours of play time on the PS2 and tech problem you mean, i was excited to start and saved a new game over my old one... yes, that happened.

My sister told me once that she would email her professor a blank file or a file full of windings and title it whatever the paper was supposed to be called to buy herself more time and make it look like a tech issue.

My Power Point presentation for American History, complete with sound effects, crashed my computer. I remember going to school crying with print outs of the slides just to prove that I did actually do the project [this was back when schools were just starting to use computers in the classroom ... I was convinced my teacher was going to flunk me because she didn't even know how PP even worked].

sadly yes, this has affected... but I still love you computer, pda, etc.

Never happened to me thankfully (compulsive ctrl+s user), but I have had friends who lost whole papers to computers. Thats probably why I got into the quick save habit.

I did spill coffee all over my keyboard once when I was working on a paper. It shorted out and I had to go buy a new one. But thats nowhere near as bad as loosing the whole project!!

I was writing this story, and I'd written over one-hundred pages worth of it when my Dell PC, unbeknown to me, got a virus and erased all of the data from my hard drive. I cried it was so awful. I hadn't saved it on any disks, and this was before USB thumb drives or external drives came along, so I'd completely lost it. I've smartened up now. I own a Mac and I do backup my work now.

I've been lucky, never lost anything important. I am a back up and organization FREAK though...

That pic cracked me up. No pun intended.

Not yet ... :/

i once lost an entire 18pg 'zine in college during finals week when the mac in the computer lab crashed.

I have a client that works almost strictly from home. She was provided an external drive and had it set up so it would back up via time machine in Leopard. Super easy, no brainer, just plug in the drive and let it do its thing. She never once plugged in her external drive. Her hard drive crashed last week and I had to tell her the news that everything, EVERYTHING from her last 10 years on a computer was gone. If it's important enough to make you shed a tear, it's important enough to back up. People just don't ever think it will happen to them :-/

I have!
I was so sad.