JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) - Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. #1 Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing information for an account worth $38 billion.
That's what happened to a computer technician reformatting a disk drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue. While doing routine maintenance work, the technician accidentally deleted applicant information for an oil-funded account -- one of Alaska residents' biggest perks -- #2 and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.
There was still hope, #3 until the department discovered its third line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable.
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And the only backup was the paperwork itself -- stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes.
We had to bring that paper back to the scanning room, and send it through again, and quality control it, and then you have to have a way to link that paper to that person's file,'' Skow said.
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 lost data by the end of August.
ouch, big ol' black mark on that guy's record. i'm just surprised that they hadn't bothered updating the tapes so they could be read, that would have saved some time.
Man now that is having a bad day. Not only wiping out the account but having to spend all that money for overtime to fix it. I wonder if he was fired in the end?
Man that would really suck if this happened to me I would do whatever it takes to get out of that state and move to another country, with that bad publicity nobody will probably ever hire him again. Losing that much money is no joke.
So, I wonder how much that little boo boo cost the people of Alaska? And, are they going to take the charges out of the techie's paycheck? He'd never get paid again as long as he lived!!
Wow, he must be really really scared now, imagine the guy who's money it was! LOL he is gonna get killed. It's kind of ironic that they chose this guy to do it though
While I a great deal of fault would rely on the technician in charge of the operation, I would also put blame on the department as well for not checking their backup sources.
With something that mission-critical, why would you store the backup drive on the same computer? It should be stored to a network storage computer with backup as the sole intent.
Additionally, the tape drives should be checked periodically. That's common sense, especially when working with something so sensitive.
