A bungled data migration of a network drive caused the deletion of 22 terabytes of information from a US police force's systems – including case fil

Dallas cops lost 8TB of criminal case data during bungled migration, says the DA... four months later

submited by
Style Pass
2021-08-16 14:00:14

A bungled data migration of a network drive caused the deletion of 22 terabytes of information from a US police force's systems – including case files in a murder trial, according to local reports.

Dallas Police Department confessed to the information blunder last week, revealing in a statement that a data migration exercise carried out at the end of the 2020-21 financial year deleted vast amounts of data from a network drive.

"On August 6, 2021, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) and City of Dallas Information and Technology Services Department (ITS) informed the administration of this Office that in April 2021, the City discovered that multiple terabytes of DPD data had been deleted during a data migration of a DPD network drive," said a statement [PDF] from the Dallas County prosecutor's office.

The migration, which took place between 31 March and 5 April, actually destroyed 22TB of data. 14TB were recovered, presumably from backups, but "approximately 8 Terabytes remain missing and are believed to be unrecoverable." Affected criminal case files include those created before 28 July 2020, though prosecutors said the precise number "is currently unknown."

Leave a Comment