So You Lost a $38 Billion File?

I have written often (http://tinyurl.com/2nuwwd) about the need to make frequent backup copies of your genealogy data, as well as other computerized information that is important to you. Old family photographs and documents also should be scanned for backup purposes. In fact, I have always pointed out that one backup copy is not enough; you need two or more copies, stored in different locations. It appears that a computer technician in Alaska has not been reading my articles. The information he lost tracked $38 billion in assets.

The computer technician needed to reformat a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, he accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account - one of Alaska residents' biggest perks. To make matters worse, he mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.

The situation became grim when the department discovered its second backups on tapes were unreadable.

Over the next few days, the Department of Revenue's computer techs and consultants from Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. labored to retrieve the data. However, they were unsuccessful. Nine months' worth of applicant information for the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund was gone: some 800,000 electronic images that had been painstakingly scanned into the system months earlier, the 2006 paper applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter, and supporting documentation such as birth certificates and proof of residence.

The department had still one more backup: the original paperwork itself, stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes. Half a dozen seasonal workers came back to assist the regular division staff, and about 70 people working overtime and weekends re-entered all the data that had been accidentally erased. Payment checks were mailed on time.

The Alaska Department of Revenue is now asking lawmakers to approve a supplemental budget request for $220,700 to cover the excess costs incurred during the six-week recovery effort, including about $128,400 in overtime and $71,800 for computer consultants. It seems to have been an expensive lesson.

You can read more about Alaska's backup disaster at http://tinyurl.com/2ses5n.

Do you have a current backup of your data? Multiple backups? If not, how much will it cost you in time and  money to recreate your data?

Comments

[dorothy]

I make a backup copy of my work (granted it is small) and e-mail it to myself. That way it is on a drive in a different physical loction.

[Bart Hansen]

Someone, our host I believe, pointed out that you can send something to your Gmail account and archive it as one form of backup.

[dee]

I wonder what happened to the employee who screwed up...

[Bob Tripi]

The drive that was wiped was a CLARiiON RAID system. Dell is reselling them under their own name. I spent time at Dell when I worked for CLARiiON (now EMC) getting them going. The sad thing is there is a tool for managing the disks (and backing up the information). It would have prevented this mess most likely. I guess somebody in Dell support was not paying attention.

[Marsanne Petty]

It was mentioned above to store a backup copy on gmail. Although this is a good idea, and I have been doing precisely that, I would like to share an experience that happened to me last Saturday. I lost hours and hours of research, probably about two to three hundred pages of partially finished biographical sketches and family data sheets - because they were all stored as emails on gmail. I was cleaning out the trash folder, and when it deleted the trash, it took about 150-200 emails that weren't trash with it. I've called in computer help, but he has been unable to retrieve my data. It was an important lesson to me - I will certainly have more than one back up in the future :)