What is the possibility that mirroring a database will damage, corrupt, or erase either the primary or target database?
I appreciate that you are looking for anecdotes about the experience of using mirroring; however this site is not really the place for opinion.
Having said that, you may find the following excerpt from Microsoft.com regarding database mirroring helpful:
Database mirroring is a simple strategy that offers the following benefits:

Increases availability of a database.


In the event of a disaster, in high-safety mode with automatic failover, failover quickly brings the standby copy of the database online (without data loss). In the other operating modes, the database administrator has the alternative of forcing service (with possible data loss) to the standby copy of the database.


Increases data protection.


Database mirroring provides complete or almost complete redundancy of the data, depending on whether the operating mode is high-safety or high-performance.
A database mirroring partner running on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise or later versions automatically tries to resolve certain types of errors that prevent reading a data page. The partner that is unable to read a page requests a fresh copy from the other partner. If this request succeeds, the unreadable page is replaced by the copy, which usually resolves the error. For more information, see Automatic Page Repair (Availability Groups/Database Mirroring).


Improves the availability of the production database during upgrades.


To minimize downtime for a mirrored database, you can sequentially upgrade the instances of SQL Server that are hosting the failover partners. This will incur the downtime of only a single failover. This form of upgrade is known as a rolling upgrade. For more information, see Install a Service Pack on a System with Minimal Downtime for Mirrored Databases.

Paul Randal's sqlskills.com blog offers an excellent set of articles about mirroring at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/category/database-mirroring/
Glenn Berry offers up some pertinent tips for running mirroring at http://sqlserverperformance.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/sql-server-database-mirroring-tips-and-tricks-part-1/