What I have experieced is that,
The time when I decided to save enough bitcoin in my desktop wallet. Since I am confident that I am the only one who's using my PC, I only save my private key on the notepad. After the time goes by, my PC suddenly gets blue screen of death, yes, a sudden issue with my computer's hardware or what. I got worried since I don't have any back up information for my wallet, and unfortunately I cannot access my wallet anymore after I fixed my PC.
Oh that's very unfortunate but I believe that if you had hardware problems and had blue screen issue then you should have contacted specialist because there is no way you would be loosing your data because of a hardware issue. Another thing you could have done was to eject your hard disk and just use it on another computer and save that file. But anyways things gone are gone and hindsight is always useless.
For me, I have never faced access issues but I have lost a bad number of bitcoins in exchanges that have turned scam or got hacked like the recent one is cryptopia, I don't know what happened to them.