I'm a sympathy whore, I know, but I'm sure quite a few of you will identify with this one.

I spent the past two hours typing up the most eloquent and inspired essay I've written in ages. So absorbed was I, that I didn't once save, and in the midst of typing 'Self-preservation and excess' I hit some sort of magical key combination that iterated a query window for which I hit enter before I could even read it (I was still typing) and suddenly... void. My essay is gone. For good?

This sucks so, so, so much, but to make this thread less that totally useless, post other horrible data loss incidents in your lives.

Worst instance of data loss? Either when my computer crashed and lost a 2,000 word essay back in Grade 12, or the time I lost my JK CD.

well, i may or may not have a hdd that's never going to play my lovely mp3s again and i'll never get them back... only time will tell

lol lol u suk lol switch to linux and firefox lol lol wtf omg

You lose at proper software recognition.

omg stfu linux lol lol firefox rox lol

Ahh I had an incident like that. The great mp3 fire of '99, a day which will live on in infamy.

I have never had any problems with MS products.

Being the ever-hater of MS products, i constantly have my pinky finger on "CTRL", and index on "S", saving my progress every few seconds

If I had to guess it looks like you probably hit ALT and C while typing the hyphen, so you ended up with the triplet sequence "ALT - C", which would, of course, close the document. ALT and C are right by each other (at least on my keyboard), so it's possible. But that doesn't explain how pressing enter would cause you to loose your document. By default "Yes" is selected when you're prompted to save, which means that my theory is probably wrong and I wasted my time typing this post, as well as your time reading it.

Have a nice day.

I have that reflex too, as soon as I finish typing a thought/sentence/etc and go to take my hands away from the keyboard, my first movement is to do CTRL+S. It's such an ingrained movement that I do it while writing with a pen as well. Of course, when that happens I tend to have trouble finding the keys...

Same here. Except for the pen bit. Nerd. >.>

Carp, tried to save. [Not really, but sometimes I have tried while writing threads... wraaa... :(]

Oh it gets worse. One time while in the middle of an experiment in the lab (one with chemicals and stuff), I got to a decent point about halfway through and immediately thought to myself "I should save a copy of this in case I stuff the rest of the experiment up..." I've done something similar in regards to the undo function. So yeah, the only data loss on my end would my common sense.

There is an auto-save feature, you can set it to save every minute. Find and engage this feature.

I generally keep my main work copy of important projects on the HD, and a backup of the project on a solid-state flash drive.

I use the somewhat obscure and undermentioned briefcase feature of windows to keep the backup up-to-date.

Heh. Yeah, where is life's undo button? I need one of those with about 400 billion levels of undoing.