someone stole my Macbook Pro. ... I was homeless at the time, so it was bound to happen

You were homeless but you had a MBP, which would pay rent for 2-3 months?!

To be honest, my laptop is more than a luxury item. Internet access is a requirement for finding work and housing in the modern age. If i was in this situation i might downgrade sure, but cut myself off from the net? That's when you really know you're at rock bottom :p

Well, some of my earliest works (including one game with amazing monochrome graphics in 150x32 resolution) were stored on microcassette. So yeah, they're gone forever I don't think I could even get hardware to read these any more, even if I still had them.

Ah yes, and later on my Atari, I used 3.5'' floppies, and this sort of harddisk that was the size of a pizza box, only twice as thick and took 30 seconds to spin up and made a sound like a hornet... none of that survived either.

Not code but I lost a whole summer's worth of music recording projects when I reinstalled windows and formatted the wrong drive

At least most of the stuff was just incomplete ideas, but still...

someone stole my Macbook Pro. ... I was homeless at the time, so it was bound to happen

You were homeless but you had a MBP, which would pay rent for 2-3 months?!

To be honest, my laptop is more than a luxury item. Internet access is a requirement for finding work and housing in the modern age. If i was in this situation i might downgrade sure, but cut myself off from the net? That's when you really know you're at rock bottom

Internet access may be a requirement for both of those (round here you can just walk into an Estate Agent office) but having your own vastly expensive premium laptop - or any laptop - is not a requirement for internet access! Don't you have public libraries, charities/churches offering web access precisely for these purposes, internet cafes, or friends?

If you're on unemployment in the UK it's a requirement that you come in to their office once a week and dick about on the computers looking for work :)

I recently lost a month's worth of work when my SSD died. Never really thought about it before that, but there are no data recovery options for a SSD. Backing up everything to the cloud now, hard lesson to learn. On a build quality note, the 40Mb Hard Drive on my Amiga 600 still works 23 years later.

I recently lost a month's worth of work when my SSD died

Ouch, how unlucky would you have to be for that to happen? Aren't ssds supposed to be near failure proof until written to a few billion times?

You may have heared that number from some extrapolated prediction for some average by someone selling these, but that doesn't automatically make it a really proven truth.

They also told all CD would keep data forever, when later it became known they contain some organic material which disintegrates slowly.

Has it ever happened that loosing bits of code, has resulted in derailing the whole project ?

Ouch, how unlucky would you have to be for that to happen? Aren't ssds supposed to be near failure proof until written to a few billion times?

The memory cells are practically failure-proof, and they don't even break when you've exceeded the maximum write cycles. You only can't overwrite the memory cells afterwards any more.

Thing is, the controller which is needed to operate the drive is not at all failure-proof, and since most drives use AES to scramble bits on a hardware level (this is advantageous for cell lifetime, and writing "using AES" on the box makes a good marketing bullshit), a broken controller is equivalent to complete, permanent data loss.

Has it ever happened that loosing bits of code, has resulted in derailing the whole project ?

Luckily, I've never lost an entire current project, only completed historical ones for dead platforms like 8 bit machines... That's probably because anything in more modern times has multiple layers of backup and version control protecting it, whereas in the mid 90s these things were uncommon for most hobbyists...