P.S. I think legislating accountability is an issue the public needs to debate. In all countries. The US has seen numerous gross negligence/errors (heck one is too many) in various levels of govt (fed, state, local). I hope we can come up with a better solution than 'fire them and bar them' and even mine of 'demote/retrain'. There has to be a better way to legislate govt accountability.

It's local data corruption here. At worst you loose the data since the last backup.

Now, in the army, they have redundancy procedures for everything, and you want to make us believe the one server used to keep them in check, not only had crash beyong repair, but has no backup ?

Many of the things that cause data loss are just simple mistakes caused by a failure to review changes carefully, even when you have multiple levels of review- I would dare to say especially when you have high confidence that someone else is reviewing your changes.

"Manual" data changes, e.g. executing SQL statements or scripts that execute SQL that aren't a part of your application, in my experience are the most common cause of data loss.

After manual data changes the second most common in my experience is not understanding what you are doing. For example, you might take a chance on an upgrade that fails because you have to meet a deadline.

Changes to application code are next. Typically when making changes to an application, a little more thought may be put into it than a one-off data migration or change, but if you are under time pressure, don't know what you are doing, or are assuming someone else will catch your mistakes, you could easily screw everything.

Following this- mistakes that cause hardware or software failure. I worked at one large organization where storage arrays with various power backups were just "turned off" by a contractor that didn't understand the impact of what he or she was doing.

Finally, you might have configuration issues or the hardware might just fail.

Really, there is no substitute for having your data backed up frequently, and in a way you know how to easily restore and have tested, by building another machine from the ground up to replace it and documenting and practicing that well. Very few do this frequently. And even if you do- what if all of your hardware were destroyed? Can you easily go out and buy something off the shelf with instructions you have in your head or stored safely around the world and rebuild everything?

This is "We had a crash and lost over a decade's worth of data" - yeah, that shouldn't happen. Ever. If you don't have a working backup from sometime in the past 13 years, -you are doing something wrong-. That's not a small series of failures or mistakes. That's either staggering levels of incompetence, or maliciousness.

This is decade of data. It should have been on in cold storage, on tested media, in multiple locations. No single error, or small chain of errors, should have enabled this to happen.

And we are not talking about "any data". This was cleary very sensitive data they new they needed to protect.

Either the Air Force is failling at being the very thing it's been created to be (which I doubt) or something is fishy (ocaml razor).

Edit: it also inspired a variation on an old joke about how the same word means different things to different people. For example, suppose the order goes out to "secure the data center."

Marines report back, "We have destroyed the data center."

Army reports, "We have killed everyone in the data center and are holding the position."

Navy: "We locked the doors when we left for the day."

Air Force: "We signed a three-year contract with an outsourcing company, with an option to extend at the same price for ten more years."

Which of course means that just because I don't think Hanlon's razor applies doesn't mean I think they're competent.

I've had this thought before. Can you think of a general, defensible clause to add to Hanlon's razor to account for this?

You need to treat it all as malice.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But don't rule out malice."

Unless that malice is aimed at keeping an individual out of trouble rather than harming others.

Ah, I know it's the way it is in some organisations, sure. But is it a good way to handle people screwing up? People always screw up. If you start firing them for screwing up you end up with a pool of inexperienced workers who keep screwing up in the same way. If you keep them around, they learn and never screw up in the same way again.

then you have ignorants, that in 2016 will not even think that mission-critical system should have SOME backup, off-site. people that will put amazing amount of energy into little political games, backstabbing, or just plain old incompetent lazy ones. those should become exemplary cases.

investigation should sort out which is which, but most will fall on either side of spectrum. usually it's really not that hard.

Incumbent trusts local IT manager and local IT manager has contract with external company.

The question becomes: "Did the contract with Lockheed Martin cover any form of regular backup and additionally some form of long term open format archiving?"

Perhaps some checklists or standards that all long term record keeping systems need to comply with would be good.

I see a fantastic way to completely abuse this. Need to get someone who disagrees with you kicked out? Hire some corporate espionage people to take care of that work for you!

No, I'd slap prison sentences on everyone involved, not just loss of government employment.