Accidental hard drive erasure cost Alaska $220k

By David Pescovitz at 3:41 pm Tuesday, Mar 20

A technician reformatting a hard drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue accidentally erased the back up drive. What really sucked though is that the tape backup of the backup turned out to be corrupted. Apparently, the cost to painstakingly restore the data from hardcopy was more than $220,000. Nobody was punished for the human error. From the Associated Press:

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.

Link

UPDATE: BB reader Arlo Midgett writes:

The Alaska Permanent Fund is Alaska's way of giving back to the residents of the state. Profits from oil money is put into a fund, 1% of which is then invested. Every October, the average earnings over the last five years is split among us 600,000 (or so) residents. As the article mentioned, each Alaska resident received about $1,100 from the state last year.

You mention that nobody was punished for the human error that resulted in the hard drive being wiped, but that's not exactly true. Note the last line of the article:

"The money would come from the permanent fund earnings, the money earmarked for the dividends. That means recipients could find their next check docked by about 37 cents."

As an Alaska resident, *I'm* being penalized 37 cents for the mistake. Granted, it's only the cost of a postage stamp, but still -- we're the ones bearing the cost of that technician's mistake.