Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke
accidentally destroys hours of work. 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 — and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.
There was still hope, until the department discovered its third
line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable.
Now I don't understand why the backup tapes were unreadable. Were they corrupt or did they have a bad tape reader or something? They should have brought in techs from Maxtor or whoever made that tape drive and got the information that way. Instead they decided to rescan 800,000 images by hand at the cost of $200k in 9 days. I guess that worked out but I would have tried to get the information off of the tape by any means necessary.
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