Data deletion

It's absolutely essential to back up work regularly. As an undergraduate, I was in a lab that met for 6 hours per week. After every meeting, we'd generally either store our data on a flash drive or email it to every member of the group. For some reason, we had forgotten to do this for a while, and my lab partner accidentally unplugged the school computer where we were working. This wiped the computer's saved files, and completely deleted a over a week's worth of data. We had to put in a lot of extra hours in an attempt to catch up, and we were lucky to have a very forgiving TA who allowed us to turn in our lab results a bit late.