I'm a celebrity, don't back me up

Celebrity comes with its perks — free alcohol, better-looking partners, lots of holiday time — and disadvantages — constant media intrusions, being forced to appear in films with Eddie Murphy for the long-term good of your career, and having to do mindless radio interviews with angry men who've been awake since 4am.

One of the less obvious disadvantages is that apparently the famous are far too busy (probably being manicured) to remember to back-up or to organise their data.

This is a topic which Snorage has touched on a couple of times before. Back in April, we looked at the sorry case of Scottish pop star Calvin Harris, who left the only copy of his latest album on a laptop in his checked baggage, which subsequently encountered the luggage-swallowing vortex that was (and perhaps still is) Heathrow Terminal 5. There's been no word yet on whether Harris ever got the bag back, but hopefully he's at least downloaded a copy of SyncBackSE.

Then there was Hong Kong star Edison Chen, who made a more common storage mistake: keeping the data in the wrong place. Sending in his Mac for repairs when the machine was jam-packed with saucy shots of Chen and various starlets proved to be quite literally a career-killing move.

Really, you've got to hope the sex was good, given that the whole scenario could have been avoided if Chen had kept his private pics on an external drive, a wise strategy for anyone who has ever gotten naked in front of a camera.

And it's not like he was the first celebrity to get his genitalia unexpectedly exposed in this way. Back in 2005, a sex video featuring Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst began doing the rounds online.

Durst sued sites that published the video, arguing that it had been stolen from his computer by a hacker. While the mere use of the word "hacker" suggests a greater degree of technical sophistication than the average rocker, encryption on a separate drive probably could have avoided the whole situation.

Once you start looking, celebrity doom scenarios turn out to be rather common. A sad creative fate befell Cornelia Frances, who has played Morag on Home & Away since more or less forever, and who also had a stint hosting the Australian version of The Weakest Link. After penning her autobiography, Frances planned to emulate former cast mate Judy Nunn by writing a novel, but fell victim to robbery. "They took everything, including my laptop," she told Digital Spy earlier this year.

"I was actually writing, I was doing two different books that were on that laptop that I can never replace. So that's gone. I'll have to start again but there you go, we have to live with that." Actually, Cornelia, you don't; you have to get a backup drive pronto.

Lack of money clearly isn't an issue (especially at the price USB sticks go for these days), so we might have to blame the star-studded lifestyle. Given the choice between some simple file management and attending the opening of an envelope, the latter is always going to win, it seems.

But what are the big picture lessons here? Nothing that a storage manager hasn't repeated until their lungs bleed: develop a backup strategy and stick to it. Keep important data backed up in multiple locations. And store data in a location consistent with its sensitivity.

Stars already have stand-ins so they don't need to lurk in front of cameras for hours on end. If they can replicate themselves, surely they can replicate their hard drives.