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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.

20 of 116 comments (clear)

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

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

    E

    1. Re:Simple: Restore from your backup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ask Israel or PRC or Russia, they probably have a copy.

    2. Re:Simple: Restore from your backup by macs4all · · Score: 5, Informative

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

      E

      Exactly what I came here to say.

      At this point, people employed by a Government Agency claiming "Lost Data" that cannot be restored from a Backup should be CRIMINALLY culpable for Obstruction of Justice and Breach of the Public Trust. Period.

      It's 2016, FFS, there is ABSOLUTELY no excuse for not having Backups. Especially not with the Goddamn AIR FORCE'S Budget!!!

    3. Re:Simple: Restore from your backup by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      It is the job of the Inspector General to ensure that proper procedures and best practices are followed. I would say it was ironic that the IG office itself is the one with no backups, but then someone would say "That's not what 'ironic' means".

    4. Re:Simple: Restore from your backup by BoRegardless · · Score: 2

      Hey, Mr. General in charge of ACTS; no backup, no job, no pension ...

    5. Re:Simple: Restore from your backup by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The reason why contractors are used is simple... Campaign contributions.

      Campaign contributions are only part of the problem. Another big factor is revolving door jobs. Most senior military officers serve for 30 years, from their early 20s to their early 50s. Then they "retire" on 75% pay, and are ready to move on to a civilian career. If they steer deals to the contractor during their service, there is often a wink-wink deal that they will get a job offer upon retirement. Then they can use their connections and contacts to work out similar deals with their former subordinates who have now moved up in rank.

      I used to work for a defence contractor, and all the senior executives were former generals or colonels.

      Of course, you can avoid all the expense of hiring they officers, by instead just providing them with hookers and cigars.

    6. Re:Simple: Restore from your backup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

      E

      Sadly, I can attest to this being frighteningly common. I work in the data storage industry (on the software side) and some of our customers don't have proper backups. I don't want to think of all the times we've had a customer escalation that was almost exactly like this. The customers frequently expected our support staff to be able to wave a magic wand and get their data back. It's really impressive how incompetent some system and storage administrators can be. And incidentally, only one of the ones I remember was a government account. Most of them were medium or large sized companies that just didn't have good people running the place. Although, the one that was government was the most spectacular one. They ended up paying a big consulting team to actually go back in and reconstruct most of the data by hand from the bits and pieces left intact on the storage. It was also the one that was basically admitted to have been intentional sabotage.

    7. Re: Simple: Restore from your backup by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2

      Once again, if you can't detach and take that "backup" with you (even if you need a forklift and an 18 wheeler or three) and plug it into a different system and view the data, it's not a backup.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  2. Re:Lucky bastards! by Tailhook · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yep. Something was in those records someone wanted disappeared. This is SOP in government now; systematically destroying disk drives, deleting PST file content, wiping servers.... just another cover-up.

    --
    Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
  3. Obama's Razor by Rick+Zeman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Never attribute to happenstance which can be attributed to a cover up.

  4. Re:Whose airforce? by Rick+Zeman · · Score: 3, Funny

    Let's see, it's a US Capitol Hill newspaper, and the article shows US airmen and a US transport in the photo. So, obviously, it's about the Kenyan Air Force.

  5. Yes Minister said it best by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Funny

    James Hacker: Was 1967 a particularly bad winter?
    Sir Humphrey Appleby: No, a marvellous winter. We lost no end of embarrassing files.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  6. Newspeak by qbast · · Score: 2

    What is aggresive recovery? Waterboarding the hard disks or straight to rubber hoses?

  7. 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.

  8. Re:No need for RAID, Distributed DBs or Backups by hawguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    No need for that fancy stuff since it wasn't mission critical data
    Must have been designed by Carnegie Mellon grads

    RAID and distributed DB's are for HA, they are not a substitute for backups. Neither RAID nor a distributed DB will protect against corruption or accidental data loss - if someone deletes the wrong records, they'll be gone from both the primary and secondary database.

    Any many people still think RAID-5 gives adequate protection against drive loss, which is no longer the case with modern large hard drives.

  9. Obama does what he wants. Clinton cover-up since by raymorris · · Score: 2

    I don't know about that; Obama has been pretty open about wiping his ass with the Constitution.

    Contrast Hilary Clinton, who has been involved in government since 1977 and her primary responsibility for 38 years has been cover ups and white-washing.

    Trump is another who is pretty open about doing and saying things that people don't like.

  10. 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.

  11. Bobby Tables by Macdude · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sound like the Air Force may have added Booby Tables to the Inspector Generals Records.

    https://xkcd.com/327/

    --
    "Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
  12. Re:Lucky bastards! by ninthbit · · Score: 2

    So is gross negligence. I can easily believe these idiots only maintained a years worth of backups and that there was no process in place to verify data integrity over time. It's a very common problem with government systems. They backup corrupted data and eventually no longer have a good version to record from. This of course is when there actually is a backup to begin with. Often a productive underling will develop a system to make his job easier and it will grow into a poorly supported critical system. It's even worse in the DOD where the staff rotate every 3-5 years.

  13. 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.)