Computer Crashed New Orleans Real Estate Market

sustik writes "For a month now the New Orleans real estate market has been crippled by a computer crash that caused the loss of online data from the late 1980s that should be researched prior to the closing of any real estate transactions. 'The clerk of Orleans Parish Civil District Court said Tuesday that her office continues to make progress in resolving the computer problems that have been holding up real estate transactions in New Orleans for the past month, but there still was no indication of how soon the crisis might end.'"

Comments

old machinery

[rishistar]

Did someone let them know that the Apple Computer they'd been using from the era had sold?

Re:old machinery

[bl4nk]

Oh, they knew. They had no choice, really. They needed a machine that could fully utilize the new 150Mbps FiOS connection they ordered.

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[Yvan256]

They're also looking into the possibility that said data was a terrorist.

What? Chaining front page Slashdot stories doesn't always work, you know.

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[Talderas]

Unfortunately their fallback plan of utilizing students to run the transactions fell through. They simply did not feel comfortable with the students using ink.

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[interval1066]

"They simply did not feel comfortable with the students using ink."

Was this before that parish banned pencils or before?

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[md65536]

Was this before that parish banned pencils or before?

Pencils were banned. Someone tried to sneak one in so that they could work on fixing the problem, but the newly installed full body scanner at the office entrance detected it and the weapon was confiscated.

The scanner also detected that the penis size was average.

Re:old machinery

[barrtender]

Was this before that parish banned pencils or before?

From the two choices given I'd have to guess before.

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[NightLamp]

Did someone let them know that the company they hired to back up their data is garbage? (i365, a Seagate company: https://services.seagate.com/contact.aspx)
They must be using all that Maxtor ( http://www.maxtor.com/home-en-us.html ) junk to store the data.

I wish New Orleans could catch a break, just one time.

Re:old machinery

[cayenne8]

I'm still trying to figure out from the article...exactly why a computer problem in Jefferson Parish, is affecting the Orleans (New Orleans) Parish housing market so much? They're two separate entities...

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[Talderas]

They got a wee bit excited over the thought that Ubuntu may be doing rolling updates for their computer systems. That's why they banned pencils.

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[interval1066]

Yeah, yeah. Typo. So ban me.

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[linguizic]

Hahahahaha, smart ass :)

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[Pharmboy]

I wish New Orleans could catch a break, just one time.

It is difficult to catch a break when most of your problems are self inflicted. Even with Katrina, the problem was the hurricane as much as the levys. Oh, and the whole "Yes, the city is sinking, and yes this land is already below sea level, but it is still a great place to build houses!". Then, I don't feel all that sorry for people who bought houses with and 3 years later the APR jumped up to 15%, while the values dropped. At some point, people have to take a *little* personal responsibility for their actions. And stupidity.

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[quanticle]

Maybe its because Jefferson parish holds a significant amount of the New Orleans metropolitan area, even if it doesn't hold the actual city of New Orleans.

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[splutty]

Yes, the city is sinking, and yes this land is already below sea level, but it is still a great place to build houses!

That describes 40% of the total landmass of the country I live in, containing about 40% of the population.

Granted we don't get much hurricanes over here (I think the average is 0 over the last 100 years), but being under sealevel is not necessarilly a problem, provided you make sure it doesn't flood disasterously.

We've had our own 'stormflood' disaster in 1953, after which an enormous project was started to avoid this sort of thing from ever happening again.

Check out: http://www.deltawerken.com/English/10.html?setlanguage=en

So it is quite possible to keep people safe. But of course that wasn't a priority in New Orleans..

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[Anonymous Coward]

The scanner also detected that the penis size was average.

in New Orleans?

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[CoonAss56]

You sir know absolutely nothing of our city and our rebuilding. Before you present yourself as an idiot before the world, please oh, please take the time to educate yourself about our fair city. You obviously have the internet, so use it.

I am so sick of ignorant assholes who have never set foot into New Orleans pontificate from their elevated stools about how we-(the citizens) live and work. Our culture is like no other in America, and here is a clue: We DON'T want to be like the rest of you!!! We don't want malls and Chuck E Cheese's. We created Jazz, and harboured writers, artists, playwrights and great musicians. It is a living , breathing, ecology that has been living for over 300 years. So fuck you. Remember, people in Iowa and Nashville have floods too, and ya know what, I have an embittered attitude toward them because of comments like yours. I say to myself: "Fuck them!! They are the ones to told us not to live here. Ha Ha!!"

When Americans of all stripes start to have RESPECT for each other we will become a better nation. Until then if you live in another part of America, and have a natural disaster and want help, "Tough Shit" for you from us in St Bernard Parish.

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[Pharmboy]

My ancestry is from Louisiana. I'm quite familiar with the good and bad, ncluding it's long history of political corruption and racism. Be as unique as you care to, but move to higher ground as the rest of us are tired of subsidizing irresponsible city planning. Being from New Orleans doesn't make you or your culture any better than anyone else.

To even insinuate that the 300 years of culture is dependent on poor planning and building on soft ground under sea level is pretty silly. If anything, it has diminished the natural ecology of the area and hurt the environment.

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[CoonAss56]

Your ancestry is from LA, but you are not so please shut up about things you know nothing about. Please go to levees.org and educate yourself on the issue. Also check out Harry Shearer's movie. We also do NOT live below sea level, only about 25% of the NOLA area is. That statement alone outs you as ignorant of the facts sir.

As I said before, you need not live in a area such as southeast LA to enjoy natural disasters. How many times has Cali caught fire, had mudslides, etc. I don't hear you whining about them. All the levees in the upper Mississippi are subject to flooding, and have over the last 3 years. Is it the residents fault there also?

We had ONE natural disaster like Katrina in over a 100 years, yet we bear the brunt of falsehoods, negative press and out right lies and GOD Damn it I tired of it. If you don't like the way or where we live tough shit sunshine. Please don't come here then and I won't darken whatever shithole you live in.

Re:old machinery

[Atryn]

I sat in the offices of the water / wastewater folks before Katrina and they described to me quite clearly what would happen if there was a direct hit of a category 3 hurricane. So clearly, in fact, that when Katrina was happening my wife and I were sitting at home as I described to her what to wait for. This was a KNOWN problem and a KNOWN risk. Maybe every citizen involved didn't make the actual choice to improve the system, but as a community they chose who they elected and likewise didn't allocate resources to address the issue before the storm.

Incidentally, I also met with JPPS about on month prior and was working with them on a system to allow tracking, allocation and remote management of their bus fleet for evacuation purposes if a storm like this hit. We didn't get the system in before the storm and we watched the buses on TV sitting in water never used for evacuation.

Its a matter of priorities vs. politics. There is plenty of the latter and too little of the former. But then, that's just my opinion from working with the gov't there and why *I* do not choose to live there.

And yes, the food and culture are great. But their quality isn't dependent on a poor system of governance, corrupt officials or weak educational system.

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[Pharmboy]

This is almost comical.

Please do continue living in Louisiana, just stop asking others to bail you out for bad decisions. And be realistic, I've lived all over the entire United States. Compare the average level of education, ranking of education, honesty in government and progressivism to any other place in the U.S. Seriously. Its a nice place to get drunk and listen to music, but calling any other place a shithole, particularly to anyone who is very familiar with Louisiana AND many other places, is downright comical.

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[CoonAss56]

There is nothing comical about it. We were at the mercy of the Army Corps of engineers piss poor planning, arrogant behavior, misuse of funds, etc. As citizens of the USA we expect the same level of care as any other. We did not ask for anything more than what was owed to us. Now we have stronger levees, closed MRGO, better pumping stations. This did not come from the goodness of the govt's heart, we had to lobby for it. Also, for the most part the Louisians rebuilt their homes WITHOUT help from the govt, and especially the insurance companies who after collecting premiums for many years declared it was the not their responsibility to pay. We had to sue them to receive our rights. It's bad enough to victimized by a tragic event, but to continue to be victimized on a daily basis by insurance companies, the media, the local and federal government is beyond the pale. I hope you can understand my bitterness.

I am over 55 years of age and also have lived in many places across this United States. Apart from NOLA most-(and I said most) are all cookie cutter suburbia where there isn't a scintilla of culture of difference. I do not drink, and actually hate Bourbon St. Our culture is so much richer than esoteric examples of stumbling drunk and boob showing. We have our own food, music, and ways of life that in a day to day struggle it just makes it better to live with the hard times we are experiencing today.

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[Pharmboy]

I understand that government screwed the pooch when it came to designing the levy systems, my beef is they shouldn't have been put in place to begin with. It isn't like there is a shortage of good land in southern Louisiana to build on. Granted, much of it is low and marshy, but the government putting in a lake and levy system at the very LOWEST part for the purpose of encouraging housing growth wasn't smart. This isn't a comment on the individual people, it is a comment on the state and federal bureaucracy that decided it was good thing, what, around 100 years ago and continuing to this day.

And I know Louisiana is more than Mardi Gra. I have done plenty of hunting and fishing every year as a kid in the 70s, mainly around the Goldonna area, and half my family lives between there and Shreveport. It still sucks that bad planning costs everyone so much, and the government's patchwork and refusal to make the tough decisions (ie: some people have to move) will lead to more in the future. You might disagree, but once so much area was completely destroyed, my opinion was that much of it should have been bought out from the people at fair market value, and used as buffer and larger levies and to create lower population density. Almost all the area I am talking about was NOT historic per se. You have to know that having homes within 30 feet of levys is not smart, and there is plenty of that going on. To see them patch up the levies and act like it can't happen again just pisses a lot of people off, including me.

And yes, California is soon to experience the exact same thing only different. Their levies that trek water into LA were built by farmers over 100 years ago and are made primarily out of rock, with no engineering at all. One major collapse and LA has no water. Then you get you see your tax dollars pay for water delivered to a lot of rich people who wanted to live in a desert. It isn't a matter if "if", it is a matter of "when".

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[cayenne8]

"Maybe its because Jefferson parish holds a significant amount of the New Orleans metropolitan area, even if it doesn't hold the actual city of New Orleans."

But, if it isn't in Orleans parish...it is NOT New Orleans, and should not be referred to as such.

Call it Metairie, or Kenner or Harahan, etc....but don't call it New Orleans.

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[quanticle]

But, if it isn't in Orleans parish... it is NOT New Orleans and should not be referred to as such.

False. The borders of a metropolitan area can extend well beyond the limits of a single county or parish. For example, I live in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. That metro area encompasses seven counties: Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, and Washington. The city of Minneapolis is contained entirely within Hennepin county, but the housing markets of these counties are interlinked enough that a similar disruption would disrupt the entire market.

The same thing applies here. Even though the city of New Orleans isn't within Jefferson parish, enough of the New Orleans metropolitan area is within Jefferson Parish for this hardware failure to disrupt the New Orleans housing market.

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[cayenne8]

"The same thing applies here. Even though the city of New Orleans isn't within Jefferson parish, enough of the New Orleans metropolitan area is within Jefferson Parish for this hardware failure to disrupt the New Orleans housing market."

Not here...NOLA is entirely different from any city in the surrounding parishes. Culturally, taxes, housing market, rentals vs owners, more houses built as doubles in NOLA, not so many outside of the city, etc.

You cross the city 'borders' here (and many are clearly defined by crossing the lake, or canals, etc.....and the cities are like two different worlds.

It really is a different world down here...different than any other part of the US I've ever lived.

I rarely go outside of NOLA...everything else pretty much sucks outside of New Orleans, IMHO...nothing to do out there, no culture, they might as well be any other city in the US with chain stores, and strip malls. To me, and most anyone you would ask down here, crossing the borders from NOLA to outside citys instantly differentiates itself like night and day.

Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup system.

[Antony T Curtis]

They probably requested a backup and some vendor simply partitioned the hard disk into two and made the backup save to the second partition, meanwhile telling them that the machine has two drive letters.

Meanwhile, they likely paid the vendor millions to maintain the system...

No backups?

[denshao2]

I hope that they replace whoever has been maintaining the existing system.

Re:No backups?

[hedwards]

It's not necessarily that simple. Backup tends to get no respect or funding. A horrifying number of sites don't include backup solutions as a part of the cost of funding new machines. And if it was there that long it's entirely possible that whatever backup solutions were available and used then aren't going to be useful now.

Unfortunately just because the volume of data increases doesn't mean that the systems used to back it up are so easily scaled, the increased need doesn't guarantee extra funding either.

Or it could be an incompetent admin. Wouldn't be the first, however it's more likely that the problem is higher up in the chain.

Re:No backups?

[JumpDrive]

You do realize that this is Louisiana? They will probably make him head of the parish if not Governor.

Remember the name 'Dale Atkins'.

My guess though is that they didn't have anyone in charge of backups or had a plan for the eventuality that their Windows 3.1 system running Access crashed.
I mean you got to take this in context, it's not like a hurricane hit them and flooded them with water. If only there could have been a lesson learned from 'Katrina'.

Re:No backups?

[otaku244]

If it's the same IT as the one that runs the connecting City Hall, it depends on the day. They've had 2 administrators go to jail in the last 5 years. Google "Nagin emails" and see what we're working against down here. We have a new mayor and I think he'll turn the city around, but there is a lot of junk to clean up.

Re:No backups?

[jeffmeden]

I mean you got to take this in context, it's not like a hurricane hit them and flooded them with water. If only there could have been a lesson learned from 'Katrina'.

They did learn a lesson: make any problems sound like they were caused by the federal government! They put that expertise to use in the recent oil spill crisis, it worked GREAT.

Re:No backups?

[Mashiki]

Anything dealing with realestate seems to have this lalala mentality to it. When I used to do work on various MLS systems for offices here in Ontario, I was working with netware 1.0 to netware 3. They had no backups, no tape drives, no remote site copies, no UPS system, etc, etc, etc. When I told them repeatedly that backups were required to ensure that they remained operational, I was dismissed and never got another contract with them.

Now you might think, why wouldn't I do it? Because the people who own many of these offices like to hand-hold, and have oversight with everything that's done. Well whatever, no great loss for me. I found a better job.

Re:No backups?

[mlts]

+1

Backups are one of the most misunderstood and neglected concepts of computing as we know it. Between laziness and vendors selling their appliances and gadgets, there are a lot of misconceptions about proper backups.

Horror story #1: The guy with the term paper on the laptop which gets backed up to a USB flash drive. Roommate gets kicked out of the university, and grabs laptop + drive as a consolation prize. Result: Retaking a course. Moral: Backups to another drive are good, but don't address the problem.

Horror story #2: Business had two machine which rsynced with each other for offsites. One of the sysadmins was disgruntled, rm -rf-ed the files on one end, rsynced that, then rsynced some large blobs so the deleted files would be overwritten.

Backups are easily forgotten about... until they are needed. I have seen a lot of deer-in-the-headlights looks from people who thought they had working backup systems, but in reality, they backed up the wrong data, overwrote the wrong items, had great encryption and no recovery keys, or the tapes were safe at Iron Mountain... but nobody had an account to access there.

Like security, PHBs consider backups pointless because they have no obvious ROI. Of course, this comes to kill businesses if something does fail. Here in Austin, there was a textbook seller for the University of Texas called Texas Textbooks. They were on top of the market. Then they had HDD problems and lost all their data with no ability to recover. End result, a few months later, their doors were shuttered.

Backups are not rocket science. You have a way to copy data to an onsite repository, then a second way to copy it offsite (be it to a cloud, to tapes or other media that you move offsite) This applies to everyone from a SOHO business to the big guys. You then validate that the data is readable, and every link in the chain is present, from having the license keys for the backup software, to having the software somewhere, to the right hardware for reading the media, etc.

Re:No backups?

[v1]

It's not necessarily that simple. Backup tends to get no respect or funding. A horrifying number of sites don't include backup solutions as a part of the cost of funding new machines. And if it was there that long it's entirely possible that whatever backup solutions were available and used then aren't going to be useful now.

What happens most of the time is you've got a small group/department/business, they hire a consultant group to come in and set things up, and then call them when they have a problem. There is no admin

So then when a drive or DB crashes and there is no functional safety net in place, they fire consultant A and hire consultant B and B moves in, cleans up, and starts the cycle all over again.

Sounds like what's happening here. Problem is that consultants generally operate on the WC Fields principle, "there's a sucker born every minute". So instead of solving people's problems, they merely mitigate them so they can get regular business, and when they screw up, they just take the firing in stride and find another sucker almost immediately. It's a problem that won't end until stupidity itself ends. The deck is stacked against the customers though - they're hiring a consultant because they don't know what they're doing, so by definition, the consultant always has a very easy job of totally bullshitting them. And when the customer gets burned, what can they do? Either hire someone inhouse, or hire another consultant. (usually the latter)

The process of replacing bad consultants with bad consultants usually repeats itself until the customer goes out of business, gets lucky and finds a consultant that's still a leech but is at least competent, or hire someone in-house, often buying out a no-complete from the consulting firm to get the support person that knows the customer's systems.

Re:No backups?

[h4rr4r]

If your backups are not offline, number 2 can always get you. Copying to another server is never a backup, only a copy.

Re:No backups?

[mlts]

Exactly. Copying to another server might help against hardware problems, but all it takes is an admin who wants to do some damage, root, and a dd command to ruin that completely.

The ideal system is D2D2T. Have lots of disk space onsite that backups to go. Then copy it every so often to a tape library, write-protect the tapes, and have those offsited. With WORM tapes (LTO and DLT have this capability), this also takes care of tamper-resistant archiving, as the data on the tapes can only be destroyed, not modified. Of course, two disk arrays replicating is what a lot of backup vendors sell... however, it just takes that one blackhat who gets admin access and the show is over.

Re:No backups?

[camperdave]

I used to work at another company providing MLS services in Ontario. Our data was on a RAID, which saved the bacon a couple of times while I was there. We also shipped nightly backups to Iron Mountain (an offsite data storage facility). Every computer had a tape drive and every month the office computers would be backed up. Also, every month we would have a disaster recovery planning meeting and would plan out how to get the business running again if we found a smoldering crater where our office used to be. It had everything from how much temporary office space would be needed, how many desks and phones, how many computers, etc. Sadly, the US powers that be decided to close the Canadian operations.

Re:No backups?

[Tubal-Cain]

They did learn a lesson: make any problems sound like they were caused by the federal government! They put that expertise to use in the recent oil spill crisis, it worked GREAT.

You forget that Obama is president. I'm not sure I've convinced my family that it wasn't.

Re:No backups?

[Nutria]

RTFA. Dale is a "she".

Re:No backups?

[Nutria]

I think he'll turn the city around

ROFLMAO.

Entrenched, incompetent civil servant bureaucracies like those in N.O. can't be dislodged w/o the thermonuclear bomb that is privatization, and a Democrat certainly won't do that...

Re:No backups?

[houghi]

[...]grabs laptop + drive as a consolation prize[...]
[...]sysadmins was disgruntled[...]

Feels as if you are trying to solve a social problem with a technical issue.

Re:No backups?

[houghi]

Backups are also often seen as an end. "We take backups every X time." Or "We are looking for backup soft/hardware.". I start with the REAL end goal: restoring.
How easy is it to restore data and/or systems?

I am sure we all know or lived stories where backups did not work for various reasons.

How often are restores tested? Most often they are not. A backup is a waste of time if the restore does not work.

Re:No backups?

[essjaytee]

This!

This is what I do for a living, I'm a backup admin for a fairly large investment bank in Dallas, and it's a hard, stressful, painful but often rewarding job.

It's astonishing to me the way backups/redundancy/off-site protection is marginalized and otherwise ignored at businesses around the world.

I can't stress highly enough how necessary routine audits are. Your backup is useless if you can't immediately produce detailed documentation on how it works, distribute reports for internal self-audit, and perform frequent tests to ensure the recoverability of your data.

-S

Re:No backups?

[h4rr4r]

If they do block level replication it is even worse than that, one messed up controller or filesystem driver and the errors will be silently copied over.

Re:No backups?

[iluvcapra]

MLSs only track currently offered properties, and the records themselves belong to the person making the listing (the agent doing the listing is responsible for making sure it's accurate, etc.) If an MLS died all of the sudden it would be a real inconvenience but the individual agents would just have to re-submit their listings, because it's their listings, not the MLSs. So the proprietary interest of the database is very different than in the case of a county recorder.

Re:No backups?

[h4rr4r]

There is not such thing as an untested backup, it is properly referred to as a paper weight. Either it was tested and it is a backup or it is a paper weight.

Re:No backups?

[fishbowl]

I work in a regulated industry where things work this way. We establish a written policy which is submitted to a regulatory agency. That agency periodically evaluates our performance to our own policy, giving our policy the force of law. Basically, we made it "the law" that we have a specific backup interval, using specific technology, offsite storage of LTO-4 media, etc. One thing that we absolutely do is routine data recovery. Meaning, as part of our routine process we have an ongoing request of media from offsite storage which drives a task that someone is required to perform, that is, restoring and validating a random sample backup. As a result, nobody in our organization has any confusion or doubt about the procedure or impact of a disaster event.

Then again, the cost of our backup system is probably much higher than the total IT budget for the people in TFA.

Re:No backups?

[fishbowl]

I work in a manufacturing environment where we have this kind of plan. The IT parts of it are a drop in the bucket, since the disaster plan gets us from "smoldering crater" to full production (e.g., giant specialized machines, mountains of raw material, amazingly detailed logistics). As far as data recovery goes, we'd be less than 48 hours from "crater" to "all business intelligence and financial data online" -- we drill for it -- as long as the "crater" didn't cover Arizona, California, Utah and Nevada. We don't actually have a plan for dealing with that.

Re:No backups?

[ebuck]

Not W. C. Fields, although he did have a movie "Never give a sucker an even break."

"A sucker born every minute" was a call to ridicule P. T. Barnum's slogan of "There's a customer born every minute."

Re:No backups?

[adamofgreyskull]

A moose once bit my sister.

Re:No backups?

[Ihmhi]

Maybe there needs to be like a write-once, read-only backup service so that can't happen.

It would be awfully nice insurance to know that even a disgruntled IT admin couldn't destroy it.

Re:No backups?

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Please mod parent up.

Unless you have true secondary systems on hand, you must know that you can actually restore your data all back into your key systems, in some reasonable time frame.

How many weeks can your business actually survive while holding its breath?

Re:No backups?

[mlts]

It is less a social issue than a security issue. It could be a disgruntled admin, but it could also be a blackhat who gets admin rights. Having everything stored on replicated disk pools means that the installation is one, perhaps two commands away from oblivion when it comes to the backup system. This is something affects every company; no matter who you are, there is someone who would love to see all your business's or organization's data be wiped if only just for brag rights in their section of Elbonia, or as an example to a crime ring to carry out extortion.

This doesn't mean that tapes are the be all and end all, but it takes a lot more to destroy a bunch of tapes than it does to blender a hard disk based solution.

Re:No backups?

[Culture20]

RTFA. Dale is a "she".

And all this time, I thought Chip was the one with the higher voice.

Re:No backups?

[Culture20]

as long as the "crater" didn't cover Arizona, California, Utah and Nevada. We don't actually have a plan for dealing with that.

Some backup requirements are silly. requiring backups to exist offsite more than 100 miles away... If whatever the disaster is is *that* bad, then the company is probably gone. Those backups wouldn't do anyone any good.

Re:No backups?

[mlts]

Problem is that there are some people in IT don't understand backups. Other departments install the client (be it Avamar, TSM, NetBackup, Networker, BRU, Zmanda, or whatever solution), and assume their problems are magically solved.

However, there are three things that people forget about backups:

1: The backup server needs to be the most secure on the network, or at least more secure than the most secure machine it backs up. If a blackhat gets into the backup server, they don't just have access to everything present, they can push out bogus restores and overwrite/destroy production machines.

2: A key management system for encryption goes without saying. Even if one of the keys is put on multiple media (CD-ROMS, USB flash drives) and stuffed in a corporate safe deposit box, only accessible by the company officers (CEO, CFO, etc.) Almost any backup product for the enterprise supports encryption, but managing all the keys can be a daunting task if not done right.

3: Recovery scenarios. There is a world of difference between grabbing a file from an image that got accidentally deleted versus restoring a bare metal machine image onto different hardware (because the old machine completely died.)

4: Retention periods. If someone keeps data on disk indefinitely, it will make EMC or NetApp happy, but it may not be the best thing for the budget. Eventually the old stuff that has to be kept for 7 years (E-mail), or even 50 years (anything doing with aviation) needs to be migrated to media that doesn't have to be kept spinning. People say that disk is cheap; but enterprise SAN disk space where you want the data that you want to keep is definitely not, even if it space on the tier 3 platters. Tape isn't going away -- even the EMC Avamar units [1] which replicate their backups have tape out for offsite and offline storage.

Backups are one of those things that you never get 100% right, but you try to do what you can, and hope that when you get hit by a disaster, you can recover something. For example, you might have everything set up so you meet your offsite copy of media by a certain time (when the offsite storage guy comes around.) However, a machine glitches, keeps a disk or tape in use and you find your offsite doesn't complete by the time the media has to leave. You then learn to start splitting your offsite jobs so the machines that matter the least get their stuff copied last.

Re:No backups?

[petermgreen]

all it takes is an admin who wants to do some damage, root, and a dd command to ruin that completely.
One way to reduce that issue is to ensure backups are always pulled rather than pushed and that the admins for the backup servers are seperate from the amdins for the operational servers. The backup servers should ideally have just enough access to the operational servers to get the data they need.

Of course whatever backup system you chose it is difficult to stop the admins of the systems being backed up simply feeding the backup system garbage.

Re:No backups?

[tengu1sd]

>>>MLSs only track currently offered properties, and the records themselves belong to the person making the listing
MLS systems track currently offered properties and history for providing "comps" to current listings. Second class access is available for users like appraisers and title company agents with either off market or archive only access.

>>>records themselves belong to the person making the listing
The listing belongs to the Realtor Broker sponsoring the agent who signs the listing. Depending on the local MLS structure, the Broker is often a share owner of the MLS. The MLS provides the "trading floor" and advertising for agent to agent business. In a little town, a weekly tour bus can show off the latest listings. In a larger metro area, replacing the trading floor can have a major impact on sales.

>>>individual agents would just have to re-submit their listings
And how do you propose to recover the history, as well as the listings of the the guy who retired or landed in jail? It's not what's for sale, but what's for sale and what does the market history deem a reasonable price.

The interest of the database owner is to sell access. It's the business of the MLS to provide data, so anything that impacts access is a very big issue. Even so, some large MLS entities so understand the importance of off site backups and felt RAID will resolve any issues.

We had one customer burn down and were able to move communications, fly out a replacement system and reload the system with transaction files to close of business on fire day within 36 hours. Another customer would ignore changing tapes until they lost three days of updates. They never missed a tape cycle after that.

Re:No backups?

[v1]

Ahh very true sorry I was in a hurry when I made the post.

One other thing I meant to address and neglected was that you'd THINK word of mouth would eventually shut down these parasitic/incompetent consultants, but it's been my observation that it does not. There's an especially bad BOFH that's been operating in my area for over 20 years, and he's got his game DOWN. He just moves from group to group, about once a year, burning them almost to the ground, and then moves on. (almost always with a raft of litigation and threats following in his wake) Lots of people know him by name now, but that doesn't stop him from continuing to find new suckers on a regular basis. It's a shame too, the problem is he knows what he's doing, he doesn't have to make his living that way, but he just apparently can't help himself. Guess he likes being the person that people grow to hate.

Re:No backups?

[iluvcapra]

And how do you propose to recover the history, as well as the listings of the the guy who retired or landed in jail? It's not what's for sale, but what's for sale and what does the market history deem a reasonable price.

These are just proxy records for the county recorder's originals-- the historical price argument is sort of bogus because the MLS is just a convenience so people don't have to go down to the recorder's office to research a comp. The MLS is not authoritative for any such data, and the MLS institutionally isn't authoritative for anything. It is the final repose of no actual information, it simply aggregates information from other sources. I concede your uptime argument, but I agree with the GP that realtors are a pretty casual lot and don't seem to be able to focus on things like backups and compliance, and if they lost the MLS for a few weeks I bet they'd probably find it a mixed blessing, since they wouldn't be able to do searches, but neither would their clients either, and suddenly they'd be getting a lot more attention for their insider knowledge. (I suspect realtors secretly hate that people can go up on Redfin and find their own homes and comps, since it commoditizes their services.)

Of course, the reason GP was probably cashiered was because his MLS admins didn't want an audit trail for their database in case anyone ever tried to subpoena it, and discovered all the comps that were getting goosed :)

Re:THOUGHT NEW ORLEANS WENT ATLANTIS !!

[oodaloop]

When was that, when Katrina hit FIVE YEARS AGO?

Are some people stupid?

[robphreak]

Why are there backup systems to take over a failure? The company I work for has backup systems (and duplicate filesystems) to ensure the risk of a problem like this is minimized. Some people should be fired.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[Loki_1929]

Perhaps there was no budget for such systems. Often the higher-ups have no understanding of why they should ever want to purchase extra equipment which isn't (visibly) doing anything to make things go.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[robphreak]

That is a cop out. It is up to the system administrators, their managers and their directors to educate the higher-ups on what is needed. Their are other ways you can use the extra equipment and still be ready for active recovery. I have been doing this for 20 years with great results.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[idontgno]

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, no matter how long you hold its head under water.

I find the use of phrases like "educate the higher-ups" charmingly naive. They're higher-ups. They don't need anything from you but compliance and endless status reports. And GOD FORBID if you somehow get the idea that you know something they don't.

In other words, your statistical sample of exactly one is not useful. The singular of "data" is not "anecdote". Dilbert is non-fiction.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[hedwards]

Doesn't work that way. I remember at a previous job needing extra batteries for the radios. The radios which were our only line of communication if we needed help. But they couldn't find the money for that even as they were pushing for more aggressive means of dealing with trespassers.

IT is a lot like that as well, just because there's a pressing need doesn't mean that there's somebody to convince that cares about anything more than the bottom line. A job like that is going to fill, somebody is always that desperate, but suggesting that the admin has any responsibility for that is pretty ignorant. You can't convince somebody that isn't listening.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[Anonymous Coward]

The company you work for is in it for the money. If computers go down, you lose money.

Public offices on the other hand don't give a shit. What happens when they stop working? Nothing, they still get their budget.

Why on earth should they invest in a decent IT infrastructure, when they can just pay the nephew of the guy heading said office to do ... something?

Re:Are some people stupid?

[robphreak]

It is part of the job of the admin to have them listen. If you are any good, in my experience, they will listen. The resoning why the extra expense is warranted and needed requires research, total knowledge of the factors and good communications. If have dealt with many admins who could/would not do that. A valid presentation as to why the expense is needed will, usually, get you the approval.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of this relies on competent management, which is not a given in local .gov.

We had this happen to us early this year. Our senior management never passed up the failing status of our backup systems, or our proposals to replace them. Fortunately, we had documented our efforts to escalate the problem, so they got fired instead of us.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[robphreak]

Good for you. Sometimes that is what has to be done.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[robphreak]

How much money has the New Orleans Real Estate Market lost? Do you actually think the voters will not care? Government is still a business and the elected officials are responsible. Someone (some people) should still lose their jobs for incompitencd.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[rwa2]

Hmm, the only way to make sure everyone knows that a backup process is a) necessary and b) actually functional is to schedule a "business continuity" exercise and perform a simulated disk failure.

Get approval and buy-in from those higher-ups first, if you want to keep your job, though :-P It probably also helps if you keep a stack of dead drives on your desk with a skull and crossbones on top of them to drive home the fact that those things do indeed have an MTBF.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[winwar]

"A valid presentation as to why the expense is needed will, usually, get you the approval."

Did you even bother to read the summary? This is New Orleans. Louisiana.

Do you seriously think that a backup system for online real estate records is a priority expenditure when they don't have funds for basic public services?

They can always revert to the paper records. People managed just fine for hundreds of years with them. Or they could just pay more for title insurance. This falls into the category of inconvenience.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[Anonymous Coward]

I stand corrected. I am used to Canada, although my father is South Dakota. I appolgize for my experience with effiency.

Re:Are some people stupid?

[dbIII]

Incompetant management sometimes have a habit of putting a "freeze" on spending so that NOTHING new can get funds allocated to it no matter how important it is. There are also many places where there are complete roadblocks to communication. That's one reason why I like small places where the guy at the bottom of the pile can sit down with the CEO if necessary.

I call shenanigans!

[Kenja]

A computer "crash" can not erase data. So either something else happened, or the data is simply offline.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[bl4nk]

They person reporting the incident is probably one of those people who believes that data is stored in memory. Because memory is where things are remembered, right?

Re:I call shenanigans!

[decipher_saint]

I was gonna say, that's a heck of a long time for "data" to be in RAM...

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are joking, right? First off, "crash" is a term that is commonly used among non-technical users to indicate any condition in which the computer no longer functions. This would include a hard drive failure. Secondly, have you never heard the term "head crash"?

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Yvan256]

Maybe someone literally "crashed" into the computer. With their Hummer, through the wall.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[alvinrod]

Might just be calling it a "crash" so that almost anyone can understand that the computer is borked and you can't get the data out. It's a lot like how most people will say they have a computer "virus" when it could be a trojan or a worm. It's a catch-all term that everyone, even non-technical people, can understand fairly easily. Even if you've never used a computer, you can at least associate it with a car crash and come away with the conclusion that something bad has happened.

Based on TFA, it sounds like it could have been a hard disk read-head crash that took out the directory structure. So in that sense, a "crash" could erase data. Either way, makes it easier for the general public to understand.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well there are some people that call secondary storage by the names "secondary memory" or "external memory" but... yeah. Reporter messed that one up.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Secondly, have you never heard the term "head crash"?"

That's when you crash your car while a chick is giving you head, right?

Re:I call shenanigans!

[alvinrod]

Hate to reply to myself, but here's an earlier article from when the incident occurred. The article states: "The problem, which has been traced to a failure in the hard drive—" and "'The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST,' Atkins said Thursday in a written statement." which suggests that it probably was a disk failure that wiped out at least the directory structure for the files or the index of the database in which the records were stored. So a "read-head crash" could be the actual culprit, but is probably outside the understanding of most of the readership of the site so it was shortened to "crash", something which is much more understandable to most people.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Charliemopps]

Most likely it all got deleted, but was originally copied over from paperwork (I doubt they were storing records in a computer back then) So they're all probably furiously re-entering the data by hand, not realizing a scanner and a little help from google could get it done in a few hours.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

A computer "crash" can not erase data. So either something else happened, or the data is simply offline.

You're an idiot, and don't know what you're talking about.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Albanach]

A MySQL crash can certainly corrupt INNODB files, leaving you needing to restore from backup.

I've seen a power failure corrupt a ReiserFS partition leaving it unrecoverable. I'd imagine a hardware fault, or driver problem could cause such a crash.

Plenty of us have seen hard drives fail, and most would describe that as a crash.

So, there are plenty of crashes that can result in data loss. It's for that reason that they need to explain why there's no backup.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[hedwards]

You do realize that the term "crash" isn't a particularly technical term, right? A computer crash could be anything from a hard disk head crash to massive data corruption leading to the box not booting to a literal "the computer just fell out a window and crashed on the sidewalk scenario." As for that last one as dumb as it is, I bet somebody here knows of a place where that happened.

It's been the term used for a generic catastrophic computer failure for as long as I can recall, and that goes back decades.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[nedlohs]

Of course it can.

If my hard drive fails catastrophically what I see is my computer crashing.

If some idiot wipes the hard dive, what I see is my computer has crashed.

If my computer crashes when my poorly written database program is making updates to the disk it can erase my data.

If my computer crashed because it caught fire, chances are I may have lost some data.

If the database file was corrupted some how and hence the database application fails at startup, what I see is that my computer has crashed.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[hedwards]

That's bad, but what's worse is how all the geeks seem to think that a CPU is made by either Intel or AMD. Those are processors that they're primarily known for and the CPU is the box that holds the processor, RAM and the rest of the goobins in.

Now for all those that will correct me on that, give off my gall darned lawn.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[iluvcapra]

When I see the phrase "The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST," I interpret that to mean that they still have the deeds, surveys, sale contracts, liens, covenants and easements on file, on paper, in a cabinet.

Which is good. It just means they'll have about 30 years of data entry to do...

Re:I call shenanigans!

[geekoid]

Yes it can, you dolt.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

The box that holds the processor? Do you mean the CD-ROM or the monitor?

Re:I call shenanigans!

[erroneus]

I'll remember that when I crash a party, get drunk and crash on the couch.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[ColdWetDog]

When I see the phrase "The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST," I interpret that to mean that they still have the deeds, surveys, sale contracts, liens, covenants and easements on file, on paper, in a cabinet.

Which is good. It just means they'll have about 30 years of data entry to do...

No, it means that the records haven't been LOST.

They've just been, er, 'misplaced'. Somebody put them in the round bins near their desk one day and they were taken away for storage. We'll find them soon. Not Lost, not at all.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Central Processing Unit is the intel/amd/atom/motorola central processing chip. There used to be separate Floating Point Unit and math co-processors which all reside in the chassis/housing/ComPUter.

If you can't determine a CD abbreviation/acronym, get off Slashdot.

(CD, do I mean Compact Disc, Cirtificate of Deposit, Corneal Dialation, Cantabury Delimination, Context Dependant, Canned Dates, Cobra Denial....)

Re:I call shenanigans!

[mcgrew]

That's bad, but what's worse is how all the geeks seem to think that a CPU is made by either Intel or AMD.

CPU stands for Central processing Unit. It is indeed made by Intel and AMD. It's only those who don't understand computers that think the monitor is the computer and the box the monitor plugs into is the CPU.

Memory, storage, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), sound card, etc are NOT part of the CPU, even if the clueless non-nerds think they are.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[PitaBred]

That'll only take 120 contractors 3 months to do.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[svartbjorn]

The term "crash" comes from the old giant hard drives that looked like washing machines. The head on those drives drives had to float very close to but not in contact with the platter. If something happened to make that head come in contact with the platter it would "crash" into it. and physically remove the magnetic coating thus removing the data permanently. Since computers had so little RAM then, itwas a matter of seconds before everything went south. The most common cause of a crash was smoking in the computer room because the smoke would get into the drive and begin a buildup of a film of the smoke on the platter. The film would eventually get thick enough to cause a Bernoulli effect from the spinning drive being close enough to the head to cause a vacuum to suck the head down into contact.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good. That will buy them the time they need for the statuate of limitations to run out. Once the data is recovered the courts will see how bad the carpet baggers have been railroading regular folks.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[TechnoLuddite]

Actually, the deeds, surveys, sale contracts, liens, covenants, easements and all that other stuff are still publicly available, and no more difficult to get at than they normally were. It's called the Notarial Archives -- New Orleans is one of the few (I think only) to still have an active one in the states. (New York has one, but for historical purposes only -- no new documents are being added to it.)

If you go to www.notarialarchives.org, you'll see it's connected to the Clerk of Courts -- but part of the deal with the documents is that they have to be publicly available. Which is why they're all in books, and all available to the public ... even after Katrina. I worked there at the time, and we had to set up in the Conference Center, organizing boxes that we retrieved from the office across from the Superdome (you know, on that street that was flooded).

I'll bet they do have a lot of data entry to do, and I don't envy them that process, but real estate people (and their lawyers) have not lost the capability to research provenance by any means. It's just a matter of restoring the info that made the process a little easier.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[jandrese]

Could be referring to a head crash, although I've never heard of modern drives actually doing that anymore.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't a window or a sidewalk but it was down a ventilation shaft to carpet covering concrete.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Culture20]

Cobra Denial

Even nine years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government denies that on flight 93, a faint "COBRA!" can be heard after the passengers attempt to storm the cockpit.

Re:I call shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

woooosh...

What is still running fine in this country?

[bogaboga]

That's one question that still troubles me. Sadly I can't find an answer in today's America.

Re:What is still running fine in this country?

[daem0n1x]

Great, then a meltdown of the financial system can never happen because banks and insurance companies are all private and extremely competitive. What about the oil industry? You can't go any more hardcore capitalist than that. That's why they never ever fuck up.

I feel so much safer now.

Re:What is still running fine in this country?

[Zadaz]

Things that are running fine don't make the news.

In general, if you want to find things that are good and not horriblescarryrazyonfiredyouregonnadie, pay less attention to the news.

Re:What is still running fine in this country?

[hedwards]

Sure there is it's called "elections" or at least it would keep them on their toes if a substantial number of voters didn't reward bad behavior. Example, the Republican party ran up nearly $10tn in debt between Regan and the Bushes. And more recently gridlocked the legislative branch for the last couple of years and they get rewarded by being voted in as a vote for bipartisanship.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve
George Bernard Shaw

Re:What is still running fine in this country?

[BoRegardless]

I call this a false analysis.

Banks and insurance companies are heavily regulated by multiple state and federal agencies and are pressured to "do things" that they would otherwise not be likely to do because of political decisions particularly in WDC.

The Community Reinvestment Act is inarguably at the start of the mortgage mess that started when banks were told to give loans in low income areas or risk loss of the right to stay in business in one form or another. That led to loans the banks didn't want and the FMae and FMac buying up these loans and then later getting approval to sell them off, etc. Then the securitized market arose, and the feds said nothing. Employees often seem to move back and forth between the Treasury, Fed. Res. Banks and other financial institutions and seem to have a mutual lock in with each other and the politicians and beaurocrats who oversee and approve their actions.

When the US federal government makes a mistake, it makes a truly big one.

Unfortunately, unlike a private business or corporation, no one gets fired in Congress or in any of the regulatory agencies after the mortgage mess. At the worst a politician or two do not get reelected.

So even if you are an employee in the federal government and know something is wrong, there is no incentive to try to get it fixed as he can't be fired, particularly if it is a contractor screwing up.

Worse for the fed. employee, if you make a big fuss and embarass a higher ranking boss about the "backup system" from the contractor that is not working, the fed. employee might then get fired for insubordination.

Re:What is still running fine in this country?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Community Reinvestment Act is inarguably at the start of the mortgage mess that started when banks were told to give loans in low income areas or risk loss of the right to stay in business in one form or another.

You are an idiot. This would not have been a problem if the banks hadn't been playing Liar's Poker with our money after the Congress, fueled by idiots like you, repealed Glass-Steagall.

Go back to your hole and think about what you have done.

And no backup?

[mugurel]

How serious do they take their business if they don't backup >20 years of gathered data?

Re:And no backup?

[nilloc]

They probably never tested their backup recovery process.

Re:And no backup?

[alvinrod]

Article says it's the Orleans Parish Civil District Court that's had the problems so they're not exactly a business.

Re:Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup syst

[Monkeedude1212]

Actually, even lazier than that. I just made the C drive a shared folder called "Backup Stock Market PC" - and then tell them that the backup is located on our server, at IP address 127.0.0.1.

I see the real story here.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first rule of Fight Club is....

Who Is John Galt?

[RobotRunAmok]

Answer is same to both questions.

Re:Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup syst

[Yvan256]

Hey! That's my IP address! Stop saving your stuff on my server!

Back in the 60's . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . while you were all swimming around in your da'd's balls, I told my grandmother that computers did not make errors, but that the folks who program them do. And she gave me a lot of shit for that.

I think the track record today proves who was right.

Re:Back in the 60's . . .

[daem0n1x]

My dad always says: Computers are great machines. If shit goes in, shit comes out.

Re:Back in the 60's . . .

[Wocka_Wocka]

. . . I told my grandmother that computers did not make errors . . .

Except, you know, when doing floating point division.

Re:Back in the 60's . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I told my grandmother that computers did not make errors

Unless they have Intel FPUs.

Re:Back in the 60's . . .

[the_fat_kid]

yeah!
and get the hell off his lawn!

Just make the data visible to Google

[Animats]

Their problem is that they've lost indexing data, not the underlying documents. So just make the documents, which are public records, visible to Google. Google will index them and anyone can then search.

Re:Just make the data visible to Google

[jimicus]

Doesn't work so well if the underlying documents are scans of paper documents - I don't know if Google's PDF searching deals with OCR'ing text. And even if it does that assumes the scans are actually stored in a reasonably well-known format like PDF.

Re:Just make the data visible to Google

[Anonymous Coward]

You solution will not work, it will not work because:

[x] it will allow the proletariat access to the information they are entitled to.

Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[meerling]

So, when did your data become important to you? Before or After you lost it...

You wouldn't believe how many people don't properly backup critical data. If it's important, really important, here are a few tips:
- Have current backups
- Test the backups to ensure they work
- Keep multiple backups
- Keep the backups in separate locations, preferably separate sites if possible, and if really critical, separate cities (Disasters happen)
- Keep backups in a fireproof safe or equivalent, it should be waterproof as well, and probably airtight
- Even though you need to keep the backups secure, you need multiple people that can access it when necessary (Accidents happen, people die, people lose keys and forget combos)

Those steps are simple, and a business can easily do all of them. Individuals may have less capability to implement everything. If you choose to do less, you are balancing the value of your data against the probability of losing it. I dealt with many many people who didn't follow those rules and lost their data. It happens, a lot. Business records, bank statements, novels, doctoral thesis, family photos, source code, chat logs, porn, contact lists, and more. Too may people blow off the importance of preserving their data until after it's gone, and when that happens, there are only two things that you can do. First, hope that a data recover place can recover some of it (all is a really long shot) but they'll charge you through the nose. Or two, deal with the lose and suffer the consequences. There are no miracles or magic pixie dust in data recovery.

Tip for data recovery. If something happens and you need the data back, I wish you luck, but here's some things to do that may improve your odds. TURN OFF THAT MACHINE AND REMOVE THE DRIVE THAT THE LOST DATA WAS ON! Your computer is doing things even when you don't tell it to. If it writes to the drive, it may very well write over where your precious data was. If that happens, it's gone, period, for-ever. No data recovery place on the planet gets back data that's been written over. They may be willing to try, and charge you an outrageous fee even if they fail, but the will fail. Usually only part of the data is written over, so something can be recovered, but it may be useless. After all, half an exe is pretty useless, but half that novel might help you out. Sorry about ranting, but seen way too many bad ones, and I know you don't want to go through that.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[PolygamousRanchKid]

You wouldn't believe how many people don't properly backup critical data.

Hell, I get calls from "friends of friends of friends" . . . apply recursion as required. And, no, no one has a backup, and no, no one even knows the administrator password for their machine .. . .

When a hard drive goes bad .. .. folks start to think about backups . . . not before then . . .

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Ephemeriis]

It constantly amazes me how hard it is to convince people to backup their data.

At my previous job I did outsourced IT support for local businesses. We'd have a hell of a time selling them any kind of a backup solution. They'd rather just trust that things were going to keep working than spend a couple thousand on software and a tape drive. Or they'd never, ever change the tapes. Or they'd keep using the same tapes for years. Or they'd store the tape right on top of the server, so that any disaster that physically destroy the server would take the tapes as well.

We'd also get visits from folks who had issues with their home computers. They'd have genuinely irreplaceable photos of some family member who was now dead... And the only place those photos had ever been stored was some SD card... And that card had gone through the wash, or been stepped on, or got zapped with static, or whatever... And now they wanted us to recover the data.

And in both cases the folks were absolutely irate when they lost something important and we were unable to recover it. The first question was always do you have a backup? And we'd get these self-righteous blank stares... And they'd want to know why the hell they should be doing a backup - that's what the computer was for!

If it's important, make a backup. Test the backup. Store the backup in a safe location.

The more important something is, the more important it is to back it up.

And if you don't have a backup, it's your own damn fault when the data goes away.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[DNS-and-BIND]

Uh, dude, if they had a backup, they wouldn't be coming to the computer shop for data recovery. But good on you for treating people like shit and assuming they know as much as you do about computers. Administering a backup system is a non-trivial task for novices. I'm sure people enjoyed hearing it was their own damn fault though. The little human touches are what makes being a computer technician all worthwhile.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Ephemeriis]

Uh, dude, if they had a backup, they wouldn't be coming to the computer shop for data recovery. But good on you for treating people like shit and assuming they know as much as you do about computers. Administering a backup system is a non-trivial task for novices. I'm sure people enjoyed hearing it was their own damn fault though. The little human touches are what makes being a computer technician all worthwhile.

Perhaps I wasn't clear...

Basically any time we got a call for data recovery, from a home user or a business, the first question is "do you have a backup".

It actually does make sense. Why waste hours trying to recover data from a hosed HDD only to find out that there's a tape in the closet nobody mentioned? It has happened.

For business customers that we may never have worked with before, this is a very reasonable question. They may have a tape drive ticking away doing backups, but no idea how to actually restore things.

For home users it is less likely that they have a backup, but it still happens. We did have a few customers who'd used some automated backup system but just had no idea how to recover anything from it.

But thanks for demonstrating the proper way to apply those little human touches.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[jav1231]

"So, when did your data become important to you? Before or After you lost it..."

Exactly! I've seen so many servers with hardware that dies. You manage to find a way to bring it back online and warn them that they need to replace the old equipment but they often don't. Generally, people think if it's running today it will be running tomorrow.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[h4rr4r]

Thousands for software for backups?
Stop scamming small businesses, amanda or bacula are free and a very good fit for such places.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Ephemeriis]

Thousands for software for backups?
Stop scamming small businesses, amanda or bacula are free and a very good fit for such places.

Ummm... What I actually said was:

They'd rather just trust that things were going to keep working than spend a couple thousand on software and a tape drive.

Emphasis added for the comprehension-impaired.

I never handled the pricing or billing, I just fixed stuff... So I really have no idea how much we may have gouged our customers...

But we'd generally sell them some flavor of Symantec Backup Exec, or maybe Acronis True Image - both of which retail for a few hundred dollars. Throw in an LTO tape drive of some sort for another few hundred dollars. Maybe a SCSI/SAS/whatever controller for the server itself, another hundred or two. Then a pile of tapes... It's very easy to spend a couple thousand dollars on a backup solution.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[h4rr4r]

I spend 5 digits on that stuff just recently, and should have spent 6, so I am not faulting that.

I misunderstood you I parsed that as:
Couple thousand on software and ( another couple thousand) a tape drive.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Anonymous Coward]

Being in the tech industry, I can relate to how difficult it is to convince people about the importance of backups. There is a saying that I use, there are two kinds of people, those who backup and those who will. I do not expect people to know as much as a computer technician, but I do expect them to honestly consider the warning of potential data loss if they do not backup. I don't push people to buy a backup solution, but I try to make it clear about when the drive crashes, that it won't be my fault. If the company that suffered the crash had invested in a backup solution, which I believe they were told about by the vendor or the server or the tech who set it up, they would have been up and running in a day or two.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[whoever57]

amanda or bacula are free and a very good fit for such places.

The cost of hard drives is so low today, that tape backups rarely make sense. A hard drive in a USB enclosure that can easily be taken offsite makes much more sense. It is far easier to see if the backup is successful (files don't need to be compressed) and restoring is also much easier (since you don't have to deal with multiple tapes, compressed files, etc.)

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[h4rr4r]

Please show me the drive that can take 100MB/s 100% of the time and is ~1TB in size. It must also last years unpowered and be rated for such use. Max cost should be $30, the cost of an LTO4 tape.

Hard drives are not for backups, they are not designed for that use nor should anyone trust them for such use. Nor are they available as WORM devices. Hard drives have a use, storing your backup data is not it.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[h4rr4r]

Also, amanda and bacula can both write to removable hard drives if you are misguided enough to trust such a solution.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Nutria]

Administering a backup system is a non-trivial task for novices.

Which is why most people shouldn't have computers.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Archangel Michael]

Have you EVER tried to get someone to realize the value of data? It is non-tangible so it has no value, NONE.

That is the problem with getting people to see the COST of losing an intangible with no value. There is no accurate way to quantify the cost, until it happens. Which leads people to the "all or nothing" backup strategy. And we know which people will choose with that approach.

The problem is that the cost of losing data is not the same thing as "value" of the intangible. Data is priceless, the value depends on who you ask.

You're right in that treating people like crap doesn't usually help, but it is often deserved. I've tried very hard to express to people what the cost of losing data is. Most people STILL don't care enough to spend what it takes to make sure that they don't lose data.

One company I tried to get to do offsite backups but didn't, their building burnt down. They had backups, just not offsite. Lost all their data. They could have been up and running with minimal loss if they'd simply packed up the data offsite. But the cost of the backup was too much, and now they don't exist. That one thing broke their business. The owner came back and told me, the cost would have been worth it, if he knew how much it really ended up costing.

I asked him at that time, if there was anything I could have done better to get him to the right kind of backup. He was honest and said "nothing". Sometimes it takes disaster to make people realize what they have. And then, it is too late.

The moral of this story: Be thankful for what you have, before you lose it, and not after its too late. Place the proper value on priceless treasures.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Nutria]

if it's running today it will be running tomorrow.

But it probably *will* be running tomorrow.

(In the 16 years at my current employer, we've had to do a DR restore one time. That was only because some stupid plumber waved a brazing torch too close to a fire sprinkler, and all the water poured right onto the SAN enclosure in our DC.)

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[fishbowl]

One big win you can get when educating amateurs is to get them over the psychological obstacle that their hundreds of gigs or few terabytes presents.

A backup system that works for terabytes and doesn't take donkey's years is probably more expensive than all their other electronics combined. Faced with this daunting amount of data, few people actually bother to backup anything at all. The hurdle is to let them understand the difference between tiers of data:

A. If I lose this data, I may pay fines or go to prison
B. If I lose this data, I may lose property or money
C. If I lose this data, I may lose something of sentimental value
D. If I lose this data, I may lose entertainment value

Category "A" data is a very small amount for most people.
Category "B" data is also usually fairly small. There are plenty of simple ways to get very high levels of confidence for this kind of data, *provided the user has the ability and the discipline to segregate it*.
"C" and "D" categories are often lumped together, into a gigantic mush of photos, videos, MP3's, etc. Because of this pattern, truly important data gets lost in the noise and people simply give up, even if they do try to make backups.

It's easy to take for granted that people will find this stuff to be common sense, but if you actually make the effort to educate the user a bit, the education goes a long, long way.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[fishbowl]

We spend about ten grand a year *just on tapes.*

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[afidel]

These days it's generally cheaper to let Mozy or one of their competitors handle it and the best part is nobody has to rotate tapes and offsite tapes and as a consultant you can get status reports on the backups and if they make you an admin on the account you can do test restores without going onsite. For my dad's small business (5 total employees including my dad and his partner) has RAID in the server, a local copy to his workstation, a remote copy to his partners workstation, and Mozy and he still insists on burning a CD of his quickbooks data and stashing it in a safety deposit box.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[fishbowl]

Those of us who have datacenter experience understand that MTBF means NOTHING when you have enough disk drives that you're replacing one per week. You'll stop thinking of consumer drives as safe and reliable pretty quickly in that environment. And there's not really much of an alternative for "a step up from consumer drives." You need a backup system, and I don't think you'd be on the wrong track if you start with an HP LTO-4 autoloader, 52 tapes, and an account with Iron Mountain.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[whoever57]

Please show me the drive that can take 100MB/s 100% of the time

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/seagate_barracuda_720012_1tb

It must also last years unpowered and be rated for such use. Max cost should be $30, the cost of an LTO4 tape.

You are confusing archives with backups and the cost difference is insignificant. Furthermore, the ease of use reduces the cost to less than that of using tapes (unless your time is free?)
While there may be theoretical advantages to tapes, in practice, in a small company envorinment, hard drives work much better. Also, with a hard drive, I can have 10 or more backups of 1TB of data on a 1.5TB hard drive, through the magic of rsync and "cp -al ". Try doing that with tapes! Yes, you can do incremental backups with tape, but they rely usually rely on the files' datestamps, and require multiple tapes, increasing the probability of (undetected) failure.
Hard Drives are a pragmatic and effective solution to backups for many small companies.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[h4rr4r]

Those seem to cost more than $30. Putting a bunch of backups on one disk, means you can lose them all at once.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[h4rr4r]

That seems pretty normal. At $100 a pop, that is only 100 LTO5 tapes.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[whoever57]

Those seem to cost more than $30. Putting a bunch of backups on one disk, means you can lose them all at once.

Well done missing all my other points:
1. The price difference is immaterial when considered against the cost of labor
2. It's a backup, not an archive!
And to address your point above:
3. You can have more than one backup disk, reducing the impact of any backup disk failure. (and once again, its a backup not an archive!)

Perhaps your time doesn't cost anything, but I would rather use a practical, effective solution that works and minimizes the amount of time I spend making and testing backups.

How often do you verify that those tape backups are complete and without error? Can you be sure that there are no errors on the tape? Were the heads clean when you ran the last backup? How many times has that particular tape been used? Are you sure that you are rotating in the correct tape? When did you last replace your cleaner tape? All these are questions that must be answered when using tapes. On theother hand, I can connect the backup hard drive via SATA and look at the SMART data to ensure it is healthy.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[jandrese]

For some people it's just "plug in the external drive, flip the big switch in time machine".

Backups don't need to be complicated, what the essential truth is that you're not really doing anything more complicated than making a copy of your files. On that matter, what is the best free backup software for Windows? I've tried a few before and never found anything that worked right. Too many fail silently for dumb reasons like your network is down or for no apparent reason at all. The built-in windows one seems especially fragile, which is a shame, because backup/restore is something the OS has every right to handle.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[jav1231]

+1

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[h4rr4r]

1. you save no labor, I swap a tape you swap a hard drive
2. I can use them for both
3. you still risk losing more than I do.

I would rather use the correct solution to my problem.
Tapes are verified each and every time. I can be as sure as you are, or more so that my tapes are error free. The tape drive knows when to clean them. The tapes are marked by use. The tapes are labeled for correct rotation and a robot does that. The cleaner tape is also replaced on a schedule.

You on the other hand use something that is slower, no single sata drive can do 100MB/s from start to finish, more expensive and not suited to the job at hand.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[whoever57]

I would rather use the correct solution to my problem.

Yes, so would I. And I believe that for small networks, hard drives provide the most appropriate solution. I don't believe your claim that tapes take only as much effort as using tapes -- I've used tapes in the past, so I can compare.

You on the other hand use something that is slower, no single sata drive can do 100MB/s from start to finish,

I found a drive that does virtually 100MB sustained data rate, so your point is simply wrong. Besides, which, as long as the backup runs overnight, who cares what speed it runs at? Essentially, in order to justify your approach you are inventing unnecessary requirements.

Furthermore, your 100MB/s requirement for hard drives is disingenuous, because with your tape backups, you claim to verify each tape, thus doubling the total data transfer size. This step is not necessary for every backup to hard drives.

My risk from using hard drives for longer term backup is insignificantly greater than yours. By alternating snapshots, even if one backup drive fails, I can clone the other backup to a new hard drive, thus losing only the alternate backups. The chance of needing an old file that was only on the failed hard drive but not the backup from the week before or the week after is vanishingly small.

As for pricing, which you seem very concerned about, let me specify a requirement: my backup medium must take 1.5TB uncompressed. Now the tape prices are comparable to hard drive prices. It's only at one size (800GB) that tapes are significantly cheaper than hard drives.

But, feel free to waste your company's time or your client's money!

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[RMH101]

bear in mind the time it'll take to restore from a remotely-held Mozy backup, given the speed of your internet connection...

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[afidel]

For a fee they will burn you DVD's or put your backup on HDD's. They also support a local HDD copy for when it's a fat finger or hardware failure rather than a true disaster that takes out your data.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Anonymous Coward]

Administering a backup system is a non-trivial task for experts.

fixed that for you.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[h4rr4r]

Any backup not tested is not a backup. You must read the data back or else it is not tested, no matter the media used. LTO5 does 1.5TB and is cheaper than comparable quality drives.

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[whoever57]

Any backup not tested is not a backup. You must read the data back or else it is not tested, no matter the media used.

So, every time that I copy a file on my filesystem, I should copy it elsewhere again and make sure it is the same as the original? People the world over trust hard drives to make good copies all the time. I am quite sure that you do. The difference is that hard drives have a lot of internal checking built-in. If hard drvies can't be trusted to write good data, then backups become moot, because the source data will likely be bad.

Basically, your arguments all come down to assuming that hard drives have the similar failure mechanisms as tapes. This is a stupid assumption.

Oh, and on the prices? A 1.5TB LTO tape costs the same (or more) than a hard drive, although, I expect you will apply some unnecessary "quality" or other requirement on the hard drive to show that it might cost more. Remember that you don't need "enterprise" or RAID-optimized hard drive for backups (in fact, using a RAID-rated hard drive is probably a bad idea for backups).

Re:Old techie proverb (sort-of)

[Anonymous Coward]

surely, guys should style up on how they keep their data. Instead of looking for recovery softwares they would opt for online backup. It's the most secure and safe way of enjoying your peace. Personally, I use www.safecopybackup.com. It has kept my old and deleted files forever. There are tons of similar online backup, you choose what works best for you. Your data is worth than $50 a year for 200GB. Guys, backup before it's too late.

Salaries vs wages

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be nice to be an hourly employee at a time like this. As a salaried employee, I would be expected to put in 18 or more hours a day to resolve something like this...

Fire in the courthouse = seller pays title ins.

[davidwr]

In some county in Florida the courthouse burned down about 50-60 years ago.

Since then sellers have paid for title insurance instead of the buyer.

Perhaps the Parish should foot the bill for title insurance. Just saying.

Re:Fire in the courthouse = seller pays title ins.

[Rich0]

I am amazed that title insurance still exists. Well, not amazed - the answer is simple - lots of people make money selling it.

This is a problem that has a VERY simple solution. It was solved for cars ages ago.

The local government keeps a registry of all local properties (gee, they have to do that for taxes anyway). When property is bought or sold the registry is updated. When leins are placed on properties, or removed, the registry is updated.

Then, if you want to know if a house has clear title you just check the registry.

This is actually what happens today, except that under law the registry is not authoritative so it could be wrong. All you need to do is pass a law making the registry authoritative. If somebody sells you a house on the back of a napkin, and you pay 12 bricks of gold to buy it, then you just bought nothing, unless you executed the trade at the local courthouse or whatever the process is for updating the registry.

Now the courthouse only needs to protect one set of records, and not the entire history of the county from the time the settlers butchered the local indians.

There is no reason that this couldn't be standardized at the state level, either, thus avoiding the need for 25 counties in a single state to each implement their own botched solution.

However, this would put the 75 local title insurance companies out of business, and we can't have that...

So how do you verify backups?

[khallow]

From a November 4 story:

Because of the havoc that the storm [Hurricane Katrina] caused, Atkins' office had hoped to prevent future snafus by hiring a company called i365 to back up the data regularly. But, Atkins said, all that information wasn't being backed up.

When the problem was first detected, "we were told it was a system failure, and they could get us up and running," Atkins said. "I don't think the court was made aware of the severity of the problem until late last week."

What would have been due diligence on the part of the court clerk to verify that i365 was doing their job? And why hasn't this problem been resolved three weeks later? I can see why realtors have asked the governor of Louisiana to get involved.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[girlintraining]

What would have been due diligence on the part of the court clerk to verify that i365 was doing their job?

Q: How does a non-techie manager determine when something isn't working?
A: They don't. They wait until it breaks.

i365 signed a contract. That was the due diligence.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the non-techie Manager has failed in their responsibility.

I wonder what other infrastructure is also untested in their district.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an IT company and one of the things we do is managed backups. I agree with you 100%. We test managed backups monthly (DR Planning) and have alerts each time it does so much as take longer than usual. If i365 doesn't then they should be sued out of existence.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[rrohbeck]

i365 signed a contract. That was the due diligence.

So if you don't get your data back, you sue them and they go bankrupt. Some protection. Sounds just as good as cloud computing to me.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[Ben4jammin]

Can't say that I fault a non-techie for hiring someone they think is reputable and from that assuming they are covered. That said, nothing wrong with carefully shutting down the system, hiding it, and calling said provider and saying "it got stolen how fast can you have me back up and running?" That would have uncovered any flaws in the backup process.

From my perspective, if it is located in the same building as the source data, it is a copy, not a backup. If it is offsite, but has never had a test restore, it is a paperweight, not a backup. I doubt few non-techies think about test restores, but I do them monthly and have to document them as it is the first thing my boss asks about when it is review time. Of course he already knows the answer as he has had our other engineer test restore stuff independent of me. We all sleep better that way.

As for the 3 week delay, either someone doesn't know or doesn't care. Perfect example of why people DON'T outsource IT, so when this happens you can at least fire, rather than sue, someone. At least in an at-will state like US-KY.

And lastly, how dumb does the provider have to be to let this drag on and hit all the news outlets? Imagine what great pub it would be to get it back up and running quickly, rather than have your customers talking about potential litigation to any reporter that will listen.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[Anonymous Coward]

All funding has been tied up in road improvements!

/I'm here all week!

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[drinkypoo]

So if you don't get your data back, you sue them and they go bankrupt. Some protection. Sounds just as good as cloud computing to me.

The company is ultimately beholden to its investors by law, not its customers... given who is satisfied first in a bankruptcy.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[Rich0]

I dunno. The problem with this attitude is that it leads to one big race for the bottom.

Whose fault is it that wood glue ended up in infant's formula in China? I'm sure the guy who bought the formula signed a contract. Never mind that he bought it for 1/10th the going rate, I'm sure that on paper it was called formula and not glue.

Due diligence isn't about reading the paperwork - it is about doing your job.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[h4rr4r]

Yet, still your data is gone. So none of this helps you at all.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be implying that investors have higher priority than customers in bankruptcy. If so, that's not true. Shareholders are the last group to get payment in a bankruptcy. All creditor claims, including debts to customers and settlements/jury verdicts in lawsuits, are paid out first.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[Peeteriz]

A yearly test of the backup recovery process would be sensible, and it would work as due diligence and reveal any such problems while the data is not yet lost.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[TimSSG]

This can of course be changed by the president as was done by Obama in the GM bankruptcy. Tim S.

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[Nutria]

The company is ultimately beholden to its investors by law

And when the "investors" are politically connected and will just start up a new business the week after?

Re:So how do you verify backups?

[RajivSLK]

Um No. You just hire an independent consultant for a couple grand and ask them to have a look over what i365 has set up and make a recommendation. It's common practice.

Objectivists are idiots.

[Anonymous Coward]

You still guys live in the wealthiest country on earth, enjoying the highest standard of living that any human being who has ever lived has had. The crime rate is the lowest it has ever been, and is getting lower every single year. The tax rate is lower now than it has been since the early 1900's and for the pittance you pay you get a social system that is actually run extremely well. Still, you imbecile objectivists ignore any evidence that disproves your dumbass ideology and trump up any news story that can be twisted to support it. You are no less than modern mirror-image Bolsheviks, looking to fundamentally destroy the system in order to build a bullshit utopian fantasy world that could never work.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[hackingbear]

All correct! But that's made possible by Ponzi schemes such as revolving public debts and social security tax. Pray to God the schemes continue to function.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[FooAtWFU]

Objectivists are nuts, but that Social Security ain't gonna look so pretty if we keep running a big fat deficit with a 350% and increasing debt-to-revenues ratio (higher than Greece).... to say nothing of the way that the public employee pension systems are built to assume 10% rates of return and contractually put the taxpayers on the hook for a shortfall.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[drinkypoo]

I don't know about that objectivism stuff but the western lifestyle is predicated upon the suffering of others, and they will only suffer so much.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[winwar]

"....but that Social Security ain't gonna look so pretty if we keep running a big fat deficit..."

Social security has a dedicated funding source. Which is why people are trying to cut it or privatize it. They want access to the money.

"...to say nothing of the way that the public employee pension systems are built to assume 10% rates of return and contractually put the taxpayers on the hook for a shortfall."

And this is different from any other pension system how? Public pension systems are extremely well designed and run. It is the legislatures that fail to fund them or treat them like piggy banks that are the problems. People who are anti-pension are anti-worker. Pure and simple.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans enjoy the highest standard of living? That's a laugh.

http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/quality-of-living-report-2010

"European cities continue to dominate amongst the top 25 cities in the index. In the UK, London ranks at 39, while Birmingham is at 55 and Glasgow at 57. In the US, the highest ranking entry is Honolulu at position 31, followed by San Francisco at position 32. Singapore (28) is the top-scoring Asian city followed by Tokyo at 40. Baghdad, ranking 221, remains at the bottom of the list."

America has a lot going for it, and it's not a terrible place to live by any means, but there are better places.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[DigiShaman]

You're living in the shadows of White Man's Burden with a hint of WMG. Self flagellation isn't necessary. Maybe if the locals would clean up their own nation's system of governance instead of the western world keeping the corruption on life support, perhaps then they too can live a 1st world life style. Culture also plays a large part in fostering societal development.

Some resources are finite, but often many more are either found or created as a replacement. The slice of each piece of pie does not grow smaller as its divided. Rather, the pie itself grows in size. That's the history of the world and global economics in a nutshell. If that were not the case, we would all still be living an agrarian lifestyle.

Perspective. Please!! In the age where the local Chinese poor can afford an MP3 player and cell phone 2010 years AD, that's an astounding amount of progress being made given their own self inflicted problems.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[FooAtWFU]

With regards to the pension systems, I admit that not everyone is as stupid as California.

What Calpers failed to disclose, however, was that (1) the state budget was on the hook for shortfalls should actual investment returns fall short of assumed investment returns, (2) those assumed investment returns implicitly projected the Dow Jones would reach roughly 25,000 by 2009 and 28,000,000 by 2099, unrealistic to say the least (3) shortfalls could turn out to be hundreds of billions of dollars ...

I will remind the Slashdot reader that the Dow as of 2010 is closer to 11,000 than 25,000.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[roman_mir]

Social Security trust fund has government bonds.

Gov't places those bonds into the fund when it steals the money from the trust and spends it.

SUPPOSEDLY the bonds can be converted into money. However when gov't sells bonds, what it means is that government is BORROWING MONEY.

So SS is solvent why? Because more money can be borrowed based on the bonds that are in the fund so that payments can be made?

That's basic accounting FAIL right there. It means that SS is NOT solvent.

Gov't must get into more debt to pay, it's like writing yourself a check from your own empty account and saying: I have money to pay my bills, because I have this check.

It's nonsense. SS is insolvent, US gov't is bankrupt, Fed is killing USD with inflation. The standard of living is falling, the productivity if falling, the jobs are gone, the prices SHOULD be falling, but the fed inflates dollars instead of allowing prices to fall, and eventually it'll be a hyper-inflationary depression with no productive jobs and there will be no credit, interest rates will soar into high double digits and US as a country will be completely broke.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[roman_mir]

I don't know who you are writing this to, but if it's about the US of A, that country is no longer the wealthiest, no longer the most productive, no longer even competitive. It lost jobs, productivity, meaningful government. It spends everything and it borrows to do so, thus it's putting its future generations into debt, and the future generations, if they are not stupid will just run away into other countries, where there are opportunities and actual Freedoms, because in US there are no economic Freedoms anymore and other ones are also disappearing fast.

The tax rate right now is high and it's getting higher. If we are talking about income tax, then there is only ONE correct rate for that: 0%.

0% is the only acceptable income tax rate.

Before 1913 the US gov't was funded by sales/import/alcohol taxes. The 19 century has show more in terms of improvement of quality of life than the 20 century has shown, and it was done with Free Market, by Industrialization and Capitalism and it was done with sound money, backed by gold/silver.

The social systems of today shouldn't even exist, they are destroying the country with debt. But of-course wars are destroying the country with even more debt - all that military spending.

The government is broke. The SS is broke, it's 'funded' with BONDS, which means that if money is actually needed, bonds have to be sold, and that means DEBT, the SS is 'funded' with debt. Saying SS is solvent is a huge FAIL in basic accounting.

The system is broke in many more ways than one, but basically it is the Federal government ran amok, completely destroying the free market with gov't monopolies, subsidies, bailouts, 'insurances', regulations, rules, taxes. Complete destruction of even idea of free enterprise, complete devaluation of the currency, total destruction of economy - it's all on gov'ts conscience, but it doesn't have conscience, so it's just on gov't record.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[lennier]

The slice of each piece of pie does not grow smaller as its divided. Rather, the pie itself grows in size.

Or shrinks, in the case of oil, coal, copper, uiranium, forests, tigers, fish, and in fact everything else which is physical and which we deplete by mining and harvesting faster than it regrows.

We can play pretend money number games as long as we like, but in the end there's only so much stuff.

Finite planet, finite pie.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[lennier]

But you get enhanced pat-downs for free.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[DigiShaman]

Not really. The cheap crude oil has been tapped, but vast amounts of oil in the form of shale exists. It's currently cost prohibited to get it...for now. Coal, copper, uranium etc are uber plentiful. It's just a matter of assigning human resources to go get it. Virgin forests are long gone in the US, but have been replaced by carbon sinking regrowths. Fisheries exist when needed.

Tigers? Ok, you got me there. Only so fast they can breed. But again the resources are out there, and plenty of people. It's just a problem of human resources needed to go get them, and that's generally a social one.

In short, I'm not worries about resources. I'm worried about the politics that prevent them from being harvested. The latter is a real killer.

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[drinkypoo]

You're living in the shadows of White Man's Burden with a hint of WMG. Self flagellation isn't necessary

It's not really about that.

Perspective. Please!! In the age where the local Chinese poor can afford an MP3 player and cell phone

In an age where Chinese are being forced into slave labor to produce MP3 players and cellphones, what?

Re:Objectivists are idiots.

[drinkypoo]

In short, I'm not worries about resources. I'm worried about the politics that prevent them from being harvested. The latter is a real killer.

I'm worried about clean air and clean water. These are resources that are currently being sullied worldwide (since we only have one planet.) Indeed, coal and oil burning and deforestation (you know, harvesting of resources) are some of the greatest threats they face today. Ozone depletion due to more resource consumption is of course another major threat to the world's oxygen supply. So I'm worried about resources, and the politics that continue to permit them to be shat upon.

Seriously?

[U8MyData]

This is unbelievable in no other terms. Either they are baiting and switching relying on the assumed ignorance of the public or there is a real problem with this organization. ANYONE responsible for data knows that they better have a backup, a plan, and a successful set of tests, period. I personally like the manager speak that basically says, "I don't know WTF happened" and we have to re-enter everything. When will this lack of accountability where it comes to systems, computers and data stop? My favorite analogy is we all learned how to drive a car and are held to account for our actions on the road, why not computers? Seriously. Anyone remember STNG episode 43; Samaritan Snare (I think), "Make it go..."

Wayback + Zwillow = Fixed!

[countSudoku()]

There all better, now back to selling a bunch of repossessed homes that nobody wants, you knuckleheads!

This system is either a black box no one was willing to touch out of fear, or one in which they had no clue as to how important it was... until it died. Should have kept that info on little bits of paper in a binder or something less complicated. It's for you're own good, you ninny.

Let's go for a wade....

[Darth_brooks]

...through the seas of hyperbole and ill informed journalists who in turn try to dumb down articles for the masses. For starters article in question is talking about them working through the backlog created by the original crash. The system went down, most of it is back, but the office is swamped trying to catch up.

"loss of online data from the late 1980s"

The data wasn't lost. From T original FA:

"The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST," Atkins said Thursday in a written statement." (emphasis theirs) also from an earlier article: "After a Houston firm said last weekend that it couldn't help, two hard drives, including one from the court's information-technology office, were sent to Data Recovery Technologies in Duluth, Ga. The company confirmed on Thursday that it can get data from that hard drive through last year, Atkins said."

Two drives. If both are from the same RAID 5 array, or the same array where a corrupted controller was writing bad data, Then congratulations! You've just moved to the low rent district of puckered-asshole town.

Now, I know what you're saying:
"B-b-b-b-but Backups!" What if your backup system is dutifully writing off that corrupted data for months on end? There's no mention of what if any backups were in place. Maybe they didn't have anything. Maybe they found the backup scripts that were put in place by the contractor hired 8 years ago quit working 4 years ago.

"B-b-b-b-but redundancy!" is more a matter of who controls the purse strings than who has to manage the system.

"B-b-b-b-but someone should be fired!" It won't be the person truly responsible. Too often IT professionals get stuck maintaining the last guy's systems. Will the department administrator get fired for turned down the purchase of new tape drives? or for refusing to re-up the support agreements on the AIX boxes? No. Will the sysadmin get a lousy performance review from the department administrator because the system went down? Of course.

It's easy to be a bad administrator. It's easy to cobble together a bad system. It's hard, however, to look at these articles and, instead of Hurr-Hurr'ing at the 'idiots in charge', look in at your own systems and ask yourself how close to this situation you are.

Too damn funny!

[countertrolling]

A computer glitch can shut down your entire economic system, and some spilt talcum powder can shut down the airlines... You people are paralyzed... The drama is priceless

Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[pak9rabid]

Only Captain Hindsight can save them now!

Re:Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

I think by definition Captain Hindsight is incapable of saving anyone.

Re:Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[geekoid]

Hindsight is a lying bitch.

Re:Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, his schedule is full of consultation appointments with the TSA.

Re:Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[ebuck]

I think by definition Captain Hindsight is incapable of saving anyone.

If only we could have known!

Re:Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true. Captain Hindsight can save anyone who right "behind" him!

Re:Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have asked Steve Gibson(TM) of Gibson Research Corporation(TM)!!!1!

Re:Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

QED

What's the hurry?

[TodoRojo]

Given the precipitous drop in home sales in October, they can probably take their time.

Ironically the clerk's name

[Anonymous Coward]

was Katrina...

Re:THOUGHT NEW ORLEANS WENT ATLANTIS !!

[Monkeedude1212]

When they won the superbowl. Despite their disadvantage of being submerged.

Was it a data flood?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ill get my coat

Re:Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup syst

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! Your server has pictures of my wife on it!

I'm gonna get you as soon as I can figure out why ip2location won't tell me where you are!

Re:THOUGHT NEW ORLEANS WENT ATLANTIS !!

[Nadaka]

The increased resistance of the water made training more effective. Running down a football field is much easier than wading down a football field.

Cursed

[intellitech]

New Orleans is cursed.

Re:Cursed

[md65536]

New Orleans is cursed.

It's true. Two bad things have now happened... to one city?!

When one bad thing happens in a city, I'd call it a coincidence. But two?! The odds must be close to one in zero.

Re:Cursed

[Nutria]

No, it's populated by a bunch of lazy incompetents who don't care that they can't find their asses with two hands and a flashlight.

Re:Cursed

[couchslug]

"New Orleans is cursed."

By its own people, which is why the cities that took in refugees are less than thrilled with their increased crime rates.

computer crash?

[Anonymous Coward]

"For more than a week, the pace of real estate transactions in Orleans Parish has slowed to a crawl because of a computer glitch in the Civil District Court clerk's office. The problem, which has been traced to a failure in the hard drive, has kept researchers from the online data

'"The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST," Atkins said Thursday in a written statement'

'when the computer malfunctioned, the indexing was lost. Consequently, for information about the period that hadn't been recovered by Thursday afternoon, "we have no idea how to find it,"` link

Idiots and needed firings

[KingFrog]

You know, if you CANNOT FUNCTION without the data on the computers, you need to have verified backups and a plan for when the machines catch fire. If you can't manage this yourself, there are vendors that specialize in this very thing. Failure on this level probably warrants a firing, when the dust settles.

Re:Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup syst

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I've been dealing with this issue for the last 30 days as I sell properties across the county and a few in New Orleans. It's been a nightmare. But apparently, the back up procedure wouldn't work for some reason. They've got it mostly up now though and or only missing the last year's transactions. Still a pain in the ass but real estate is slowly moving again.

Re:Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup syst

[operagost]

Excuse me, but due to our history of racial intolerance, "server" is an unacceptable term due to the implied relationship with a "master".

Re:

[marcosdumay]

"Are some people stupid?"

Yes.

Re:THOUGHT NEW ORLEANS WENT ATLANTIS !!

[camperdave]

Some of the team were water polo ringers

Re:Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup syst

[Yvan256]

You're thinking about IDE drives, which could be set to either "master" or "slave".

Re:

[robphreak]

LOL. Too true.

Audits?

[essjaytee]

Why was there no audit performed?

I'm the backup admin for a sizeable investment bank, and we have FDIC audits, OTS audits, Grant Thornton Audits, internal monthly audits. I don't understand why a government IT infrastructure isn't carefully audited, documented, monitored and reported on.

Maybe this is one of those situation where the solution is outsourced, but they bear none of the responsibility.
-S

Every now and then...

[bjk002]

a snarky, snide, sarcastic comment such as this just fills my face with grin. Thanks!

Oblibatory?

[Mr. Munshun]

Makes me think of John Cleese and his Institute for Backup Trauma: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgxgYL5P4z4

Solved for houses too

[Chuck Chunder]

It's called Torrens title. Of course, backups are still important, it's just the amount of data is smaller and the format likely to be friendlier than digitised versions of some ancient papyrus.

Software issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the problem is a software issue. If they were using an old program, and didn't have a backup of the program, they could have lost the program if the hard drive died. And if the program used a proprietary data format...

Or if it wax a really old program running on really old hardware and the hardware died, they might be unable to run the program. There are good reasons to migrate to new hardware and new software on a regular basis.

No backups or redundancy

[dbIII]

A horrifying number of sites don't include backup solutions as a part of the cost of funding new machines.

For instance the recent Andersons/Accecture stuffup for the booking system of an airline where the loss of a single SSD rendered the entire system useless (no redundancy) and the backup was also useless but everything was according to the contract apparently.
I've met quite a few people with the attitude of "it's on RAID5 in a crappy little cheap three disk NAS box in the spot where the roof leaks, we don't need backups" and sometimes have had to set up undocumented backup systems to protect against their idiocy. RAID is not a backup.

Re:Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup syst

[Anonymous Coward]

How appropriate, an expensive snake-oil backup system for a computer serving an expensive, snake-oil real estate market.