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

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.

Comments

Simple: Restore from your backup

[gavron]

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

E

Re:Simple: Restore from your backup

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Simple: Restore from your backup

[macs4all]

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!!!

Re:Simple: Restore from your backup

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Lucky bastards!

[Tailhook]

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.

Obama's Razor

[Rick Zeman]

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

Re:Whose airforce?

[Rick Zeman]

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.

Yes Minister said it best

[whoever57]

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

Re:They have to be in violation of something

[Rick Zeman]

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.

Re:No need for RAID, Distributed DBs or Backups

[hawguy]

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.

THIS. Most untested backups don't work

[raymorris]

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.

Bobby Tables

[Macdude]

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

https://xkcd.com/327/

Fire contractor, announce name

[myid]

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.)