A recent interview has unearthed a number of ridiculous situations which have led to disaster recovery, highlighting the importance of something like online data backup.

While it is hoped that disaster recovery is never needed, Jake Widman of bMighty spoke to Dyan Parker, the chief performance officer at US firm WeRecoverData, who explained that certain strange happenings have resulted in the need for the company's services.

She told Mr Widman that she had been asked to recover information from a phone that had been left in a glove compartment and to retrieve information from a laptop someone dropped in a lake.

However, some are not quite as silly, with Ms Parker explaining that dialogue boxes on PCs should never have the user clicking "yes" in a hurry, as they could be potentially unleashing viruses or agreeing to format a hard drive.

Additionally, the disaster recovery expert said that as soon as something does not feel right about a drive, it should be switched off and taken to an expert to assess.

Even online data backup systems should be backed up, Ms Parker added, just to make sure.

Commenting on such systems, Business Link - the government resource - said: "It is good security practice to work out in advance how your business could survive and recover from such an incident, recording this in the form of a disaster recovery plan."

New research from Connect found that, on average, it takes businesses that use backup tapes take 11.6 hours to retrieve and restore files. Connect is now recommending that SMEs switch to online backup.