Posted on 06/15/2016 7:58:41 AM PDT by Lorianne
The U.S. Air Force has lost records concerning 100,000 investigations into everything from workplace disputes to fraud.
A database that hosts files from the Air Force’s inspector general and legislative liaison divisions became corrupted last month, destroying data created between 2004 and now, service officials said. Neither the Air Force nor Lockheed Martin, the defense firm that runs the database, could say why it became corrupted or whether they’ll be able to recover the information.
Lockheed tried to recover the information for two weeks before notifying the Air Force, according to a service statement.
The Air Force has begun asking for assistance from cybersecurity professionals at the Pentagon as well as from private contractors.
Where I worked we had daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups. And we verified the data was readable and stored off site. You can always replace hardware but not the data.
You really have to be incredibly negligent, careless or devious to lose data.
something ridiculous and outrageous going on with this.....
beyond mere incompetence.....
Ooops...
Database corruption is not the same thing as a computer crash.
Corruption can mean that records were updated incorrectly for years, and that the data is invalid and unusable. If that is true, then all backups are invalid too.
That is not a crash.
Every single system!! And have gone through multiple recovery exercises and many actual recoveries. All with the worst case being a lose of one or two days worth of data.
This does NOT PASS the smell test at all.
This type of headline is awfully fishy. Computer servers have been set up with a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) for at least 10 years. Information is copied across many hard drives and if one fails, the information still exists, because it is stored at least on two of the RAID hard drives.
If old technology, no one server would have the information on it, with no backup on external tapes or disks.
For the Federal Government to claim that it has lost all data, is questionable in the least.
I can understand a fire destroying paper copies. This claim is just like saying that it will take 75 years to come up with emails that were produced over a four or five year period, on one individual server (Oh, my bad. That is the claim).
A single database that large is likely to be unstable. They should have kept the various types of investigations compartmentalized, with the capability of searching across multiple databases.
Of course, if they didn’t back up the data, there should be widespread firings on both sides of the military-industrial complex.
Thank you. That is the logical explanation. It just seems that they would be periodically checking their data for accuracy.
Very good point. If the corruption has been ongoing and they have not been doing integrity checks of the data being saved, then yes all the backups may contain crap too.
In 1992 as I was nearing completion of a book project developed on my first computer, I wised up and took backup copies to work each Monday after working on the project over the weekend. Way overdue, but too far along to lose it all to a house fire or flood while I was at work.
I may still have some of those 5-1/4” floppies that I could loan to the gubermint - anything to help.
In doing genealogy work on ancestors in the mid-19th Century, I kept getting stymied by the number of courthouse fires. Finally an experienced researcher told me that Courthouse arson was the preferred method to use when you were going to lose a court case. Too bad the USAF contract manager wasn’t a genealogist.
I suspect this lack of basic security of files (back-ups) is by design rather than ineptness.
My sentiments as well. “Backup, backup backup”
That’s an excellent point. All kinds of records will suddenly disappear overnight. You can count on it.
The Inspector General’s Offices are going to be working overtime trying to find out what happened to all the data. More importantly, Trump will have to demonstrate that he means business and hold the bureaucrats, most of whom are liberals, to account. Cleaning up the swamp that is the federal government is going to be a huge job. I hope he puts someone like Rudy Guliani in charge of restoring integrity and accountability in the government.
Uh, daily backups - kind of a common-sense best-business practice.
Example of a truism: the bigger the government gets the stupider it gets.
I can tell you how this happens because I worked in an AF office where the situation was heading this way.
Airman Snuffy had five jobs each day which took only two hours to accomplish. One of the jobs was to run a back-up at the end of each day (he’d put a tape in, hit the back-up function) and come in the next day to mark the tape and store it.
Well...Snuff found that the tape back-up device was broke. He reported this two or three times but it never went to the right people. Snuffy stopped back-ups. Roughly a year passed (yeah, no one ever asked or suspected anything).
Then one day....the server is found to be failing. We said fine....no need to worry...we got back-ups. Well...no.
We fired Snuffy that day (sending him to another function). We spent three weeks gently trying to bring this server to a condition where it would allow one single back-up and it worked. After that, we made it a weekly thing to ask for evidence of the kid doing his job.
In this case, the fact we are talking about a probable RAID device that was a minimum of 12 years old. The guys running this probably never put much money into hardware or had a life-cycle plan for what they were doing. Maybe it was a hand-me-down RAID...that was already 5 years old when acquired.
You can emphasize all you want...but your data is only as good as the back-up copy...even for your home CPU. So if you’ve been collecting family photos and achieving a lot of pictures that you’ve taken on vacations, and you never made a back-up of that group....it’s your tough luck when the HD fails.
Some types of Top Secret data aren’t backed up in traditional ways.
Archives and backups procedures/programs are typically underfunded and understaffed and under inspected.
But, you can usually assume the worst from Government agencies because they get high ranked political appointees who’s job it is to keep things from being figured out. High ranked career employees will not risk their jobs by whistleblowing so turn their heads away. The ones that don’t are the ones you hear in the news under soul crushing reprisals by fellow works, superiors and even leaks to news papers who gleefully publish suspiciously sourced hit pieces.
My brother was the MIS guy at a medium sized corp.
For years he carried a briefcase home with a back up cartridge, that was uploaded into a duplicate system at his house.
Each key exec had a part of the system at home. They had practice drills to reassemble a working system.
To cover for a physical event on the main office.
He says, companies that lose their data disappear.
AYFKM? For real?
I know a guy who got let go from a construction contractor because he improperly saved everything to his work computer in a section that didn’t get backed up, his computer crashed, and 4 years work was gone.
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