Whoops! Technician Error Deletes Alaska Department of Revenue Data

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Make no mistake about it, it was definitely the worst-case scenario. Not only did the tech delete applicant information for an oil-funded account, he also reformatted the backup drive. And then … it turns out the backup tapes were unreadable. Nine months of data for the Alaska Permanent Fund were gone.

As Wikipedia says: The Alaska Permanent Fund was originally envisioned to serve two general purposes: to set aside a share of oil revenues for the benefit of future generations of Alaskans after the depletion of the oil reserves, and to keep a share of oil revenues out of the hands of the current generation of politicians who could be counted on to spend it on wasteful government operations and capital expenditures.

Big oops, right? The account was worth $38 billion.

Over the next few days, as the department, the division and consultants from Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. labored to retrieve the data, it became obvious the worst-case scenario was at hand.

Nine months worth of information concerning 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.

And the only backup was the paperwork itself—stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes. Source: Breitbart.com

We Say: They managed to recover the data, and have instituted new backup and restore procedures. They don’t mention what happened to the tech, but they say that “no one was ever blamed for the incident.”