How to respond: If your IT team can't bring your computer back to life, the only option is to send the drive to a data recovery service, which can charge anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars to rescue your files. The services aren't always successful.

Preventive measures: Back up your hard drive often, and use online services such as Mozy, iBackup, or EVault, which charge monthly fees of about $10 and up per employee. That way, even if a fire or flood ravages your server room, the data will be fine. You could also swap your current hard drive for a system that uses two drives to store two sets of your data, otherwise known as a RAID. So if one of the hard drives were to fail, you would still have the other.