The point of backing up your data is to prevent a situation where the original files are the only copy and they get lost, accidentally deleted, or some hardware issue causes it to no longer be accessible. However, what happens when you delete the backup? Unfortunately for the Dallas Police Department, that’s kind of what happened.
It seems that during a routine data migration that took place in April, a city employee had accidentally deleted 8TB worth of data in the process. For those wondering how big 8TB is, it’s basically 8,000GB. You might ask, if it happened in April, why are we only hearing about it now? It is because it took this long before it was disclosed, with the city mayor and district attorney’s office both claiming that they had just found out about it.
So what does this mean, now that the data has been deleted? These files contain images, videos, audio, case notes, and other items that the police department had collected over the course of their daily duties. It is believed that as a result, it could throw several court cases into jeopardy as they will no longer have access to the materials they might need for their cases.
In fact, we’re already seeing the consequences of it. A report from the Associated Press claims that one man, Jonathan Pitts, has been released on bond after supposedly being on trial for murder. This is because authorities are worried that the evidence related to his case could be part of that deleted data.
Filed in . Read more about Hack and Security. Source: gizmodo