So You've Lost a $38 Billion File

smooth wombat writes "Imagine you're reformatting a hard drive so you can do a clean install but then realize that you have also reformatted the back up hard drive. No problem. You reach for your back up tapes only to find out that the information on the tapes is unreadable. Now imagine the information that is lost was worth $38 billion. This scenario is apparently what happened in July to the Alaska Department of Revenue. From the article: 'Nine months worth of information concerning the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund was gone: some 800,000 electronic images that had been painstakingly scanned into the system months earlier, the 2006 paper applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter, and supporting documentation such as birth certificates and proof of residence.' Using the 300 cardboard boxes containing all the information, staff worked overtime for several months to rescan everything at an additional cost of $200,000."

Comments

$38 Billion is a big incentive for fraud

[spun]

Ah, but we don't know the actual cost. Thirty eight billion is a lot of money. Suppose I wanted to skim some of that money, but I knew that the documentation existed in paper and computerized form. Perhaps I know someone in the records department who can shuffle some papers, but then the computerized records won't match. Oops, now those records are gone and we have no choice but to scan in the documents that I have changed, now everything agrees and there is no record of where that extra million or ten went.

Re:Data Recovery options?

[dpilot]

About a month or 2 back, a slip of the fingers turned my root filesystem into a linux swap partition.

Google was my friend. Shortly I learned more about backup superblocks, how to run "mkfs.ext3 -n" to do a dummy mkfs and find out where my backup superblocks are, and "fsck.ext3 -b nnn" to repair the filesystem using the backup superblock.

I was back running in less than an hour, including google time. Repairing an accidental mkswap on top of ext3 is actually one of the easier things to fix.

On the other hand, having a system and procedures that made it possible to kill regular and backup data that way, and storing unconfirmed tapes, is clearly not a good idea. Whenever I burn a CD/DVD, I take the few extra minutes and verify it right away. If the backup tape was only a few months old, odds are it was improperly written, as opposed to degraded. They should check their other backup tapes.