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Air Force Has Lost 100,000 Inspector General Records (thehill.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Backups?-What-backups? dept.

schwit1 shares an article from The Hill: The Air Force announced on Friday that it has lost thousands of records belonging to the service's inspector general due to a database crash. "We estimate we've lost information for 100,000 cases dating back to 2004," Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told The Hill in an email. "The database crashed and there is no data..." The database, called the Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS), holds all records related to IG complaints, investigations, appeals and Freedom of Information Act requests.... "We also use ACTS to track congressional/constituent inquiries."
The Air Force said they were "aggressively" trying to recover the data, adding that they had no evidence of malicious intent.

4 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Simple: Restore from your backup by gavron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You... do... have a backup, ... right?

    E

  2. Re:They have to be in violation of something by Rick+Zeman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's mention the first 3 laws of computing:

      1 - Backup

      2 - BACKUP

      3 - See Rules 1 & 2
    ]

    1 - Backup
    2 - BACKUP
    3 - Test restoration of backup

    There, fixed it for you.

  3. THIS. Most untested backups don't work by raymorris · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You hit the nail on the head. I've probably encountered more broken backups than ones that work. Web hosting providers frequently provide backups that stopped working 10 months ago, but nobody noticed. If you haven't recently tested restoring your backups, you probably have no backups.

    I like to use remote backups that I can restore from conveniently, so that I restore a file from time to time just because I messed up a couple paragraphs of text or something. These real-life, low-impact restores serve to verify backup and restore is working properly.

  4. Fire contractor, announce name by myid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From the article:

    The Air Force said it was notified on June 6 by a contractor that administers the database of records that the data within was "corrupted," according to a statement.

    How many contractors administered the database? I wonder if that was part of the problem: "Oh, I thought you guys were going to back up the database ... No you were supposed to back it up."

    If just one contractor was clearly responsible for the backup, then I wish the government would:

    1) Fire the contractor, and never use them again.

    2) Publicly announce the name of the contractor, so that we know not to use them.

    (Of course a lot more needs to be done, such as making sure this doesn't happen again in any govt. dept.)