Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases

Re:Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases by dylan604 on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @10:15AM (#28210077)

It's funny to me that they will build/secure/protect a large amount of physical square footage to store physical evidence, and that's part of its budget. It would not surprise me that things are so screwy that buying hard drives and other backup type of purchases are not budgeted for and have to be made at the expendable type of requests.

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Re:Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases by kkielhofner on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @11:50AM (#28211194)

Governments tend to be reactive and only after multiple high-profile defeats and general pressure from defenses did they get around to taking evidence security seriously in their practices, budgets, etc.

Unfortunately it's probably going to take many more multiple TB losses (resulting in failed prosecutions) for them to take this seriously with digital evidence as well.

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Re:Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases by ocdtrekkie on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @02:30PM (#28213206)

It's very hard for some people to see and understand digital storage, in terms of capacity, redundancy, and reliability. Physical storage is very visual and very easy to understand: You put crud in a room and it sits there until someone does something with it.

One of the things I find nontechnical people tend to fail to understand is the importance of organizing and cleaning up data. Often when we are running out of space, I get asked why we can't just buy another hard drive at Best Buy for $50.

Then when people do clean up their data, they don't understand file space. They'll spend hours cleaning up old Word documents, but not touch the decade-old AVI video files which could at least be stored in a better format.

Ask a government entity to buy a SAN, they complain. Ask them to buy a backup storage appliance, they ask why we need another SAN. And then in five years, they ask why you need another SAN if you bought one five years ago...

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Re:Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases by dylan604 on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @05:01PM (#28214819)

My favorite reference for comparing physical/digital storage was from a former co-worker of mine. Imagine your vault/storage/library with all of the shelves with their contents clearly marked and organized. Now, imagine someone knocking all of the stuff off the shelves and shoving it all into a large pile. That's your harddrive.

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