Posted on 08/13/2021 5:29:00 AM PDT by devane617
LOCAL NEWS Dallas police lost about 8 terabytes of files related to pending cases, officials say
In April 2021, the city discovered that multiple terabytes of DPD data had been deleted while moving data involving a DPD network drive.
Dallas police lost about 8 terabytes of files related to pending cases, officials say
City and county leaders are trying to examine the scope of a data loss after approximately eight terabytes of Dallas Police Department information was deleted in April, officials said Wednesday. The Dallas County District Attorney's office shared the disclosure, since it may impact some cases. It's possible that much of the missing evidence was already updated to the data portal prior to the data loss, said District Attorney John Creuzot.
In a memo, the office said that on Aug. 6, it was notified by the Dallas Police Department and the city's IT department that in April 2021, the city discovered that multiple terabytes of DPD data had been deleted while moving data involving a DPD network drive. "This is an unfortunate situation, but we’ve been working closely with City ITS to ascertain what occurred to our files, are missing files retrievable, and how to ensure this doesn’t happen again," Chief Eddie Garcia said in a statement. "I have spoken to DA Creuzot, and we will be working through whatever issues arise together." The data loss applies to cases with offense dates before July 28, 2020. Anyone who believes their case was impacted by this issue is asked to submit a written request to the trial prosecutor, the memo said. "At this time, it is too soon to estimate how many cases will be affected and what the impact will be on those individual cases," Creuzot said in a statement. "Chief Garcia and I have been in constant communication on this over the past few days and are committed to ensuring justice is served on each case." On Aug. 9, the police department shared more information with the attorney's office: 22 terabytes of data were deleted from March 31 to April 5, according to officials. About 14 terabytes were recovered but approximately eight Terabytes remain missing and are believed to be unrecoverable, the memo said. One Terabyte (or 1,000 gigabytes) is equivalent to about 16 iPhones, the 512GB model. The City of Dallas became aware of the issue on April 5 when DPD users noticed certain files were missing, the memo said. The City of Dallas is working on a plan to specifically identify affected cases, the memo said. The attorney's office asked DPD for a date range of affected cases to narrow down the scope of potentially impacted cases.
Last excuse used was the pandemic.
“Lost data”
Any competent lawyer will argue even if the files are recovered the chain of custody has been lost and therefore the evidence is inadmissible.
Another one for the "utterly idiotic comparisons" file.
They lost the backups, too?
Completely unrelated: After thousands of cases were dropped, the violent crime rate tripled.
Sounds like an accident. Right.
As someone who just retired from 36 years in IT, may I just say this: the utter incompetence of government workers never ceases to amaze me.
Who would call the police the next time?
I guess requiring files be backed up is to much to ask?
Three t-bites of data takes up about the 3”x5”x2” of real space.
I was a mainframe storage manager for twenty years. There are duplicates and sometimes triplicate backups with some of them being stored offsite. What do you mean ‘lost’.
Storage is absurdly inexpensive. It used to be the cost bottleneck in enterprises, now it’s so cheap they throw it away after a few years. 8+ terabyte drives can be had for ~$200.
It seems city IT departments are less than competent.
A year or two ago, Baltimore decided not to spend a couple thousand dollars on a security patch. So of course they got ransomware attacked. It shut the entire city systems down for months.
“Dear Resident, We realize we never sent you a water bill. Please estimate what you owe and hand deliver it to the City Water Department.”
No really, that’s about what they sent out for bills.
Of course, being Baltimore, there’s never been an accounting as to how much they lost in dollars and critical records.
Let’s not even talk about elections.
Twenty years ago, I worked in an Air Force unit where we had a server only for back-ups, and one single guy assigned to the task (maybe four hours of real work, after everyone had gone home). It was simple enough for an idiot.
Somewhere about three months into this....the server had issues. ‘Snuffy’ (the airman to make back-ups) spent two weeks trying to figure out the issue, and then tried to interest two other folks who had the expertise. Nothing happened.
This no back-up era went on for almost eight months. The primary system started to fail, and we felt ok because we all thought ‘Snuffy’ was doing his job.
I’ll just say for about a 72-hour period....everything went badly, and some folks spent twenty hours a day....rigging up another back-up drive and exercising one last back-up out of the primary drive. We sent ‘Snuffy’ to another organization after that.
I could easily see this scenario repeating in a police organization.
Math, people. Math. One TB is equivalent to 2 storage devices at 512GB. This should be saying "Eight Terabytes (or 8,000 gigabytes) ...".
I’ve known a few people that brought companies to their knees by running tests on the live server instead of test. Oops.
was it really “lost” or did someone within the department just delete the data because of “equity”?
That’s a LOT of files.
It becomes increasingly obvious that Law Enforcement exists to protect criminals and persecute the law-abiding.
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