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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.'"
Did someone let them know that the Apple Computer they'd been using from the era had sold?
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
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.
Hey! That's my IP address! Stop saving your stuff on my server!
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.
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.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Only Captain Hindsight can save them now!
Given the precipitous drop in home sales in October, they can probably take their time.
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.
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...
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
+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.
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.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.