Yesterday I pulled my slim external hard disk out of a computer holding it by the cable, which came out and the hard disk fell about 2 feet/0.5 m onto a hard floor. It does not work now (I can see the directory structure, and could pay someone to retrieve stuff probably). So, I lost almost 100 gigabytes of stuff. But, besides causing me to get nothing done yesterday, I may have really lost nothing: this hard disk I used to move data between computers and is not an archive hard disk.

Lessons: use two hands when you remove hard disks: one for the disk and one for the cable. I usually use a laptop on a table and you only need to us one hand, but this was on a "tower" computer with the usb drive on front.
Use jump drives to transfer data when you can (but, they are slower, and some of the files I move around are 4 gigabytes).

And, do what I do that kept this from being a disaster: keep anything important on an archive hard disk kept in another, safe location (heartland wife's office...).

Hard drives fail, even when you don't drop them.

Chris