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

[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

[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.

Re:Probably had an expensive snake-oil backup syst

[Yvan256]

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

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: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.

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:Captain Hindsight to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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.