No backups? How freaking incompetent.
Backups are so standard and routine that this goes beyond incompetence. As someone noted above, this was clearly an intentional act to hide something.
I’m pretty sure it is less innocent than simple incompetence.
My sentiments as well. “Backup, backup backup”
I can tell you how this happens because I worked in an AF office where the situation was heading this way.
Airman Snuffy had five jobs each day which took only two hours to accomplish. One of the jobs was to run a back-up at the end of each day (he’d put a tape in, hit the back-up function) and come in the next day to mark the tape and store it.
Well...Snuff found that the tape back-up device was broke. He reported this two or three times but it never went to the right people. Snuffy stopped back-ups. Roughly a year passed (yeah, no one ever asked or suspected anything).
Then one day....the server is found to be failing. We said fine....no need to worry...we got back-ups. Well...no.
We fired Snuffy that day (sending him to another function). We spent three weeks gently trying to bring this server to a condition where it would allow one single back-up and it worked. After that, we made it a weekly thing to ask for evidence of the kid doing his job.
In this case, the fact we are talking about a probable RAID device that was a minimum of 12 years old. The guys running this probably never put much money into hardware or had a life-cycle plan for what they were doing. Maybe it was a hand-me-down RAID...that was already 5 years old when acquired.
You can emphasize all you want...but your data is only as good as the back-up copy...even for your home CPU. So if you’ve been collecting family photos and achieving a lot of pictures that you’ve taken on vacations, and you never made a back-up of that group....it’s your tough luck when the HD fails.
Some types of Top Secret data aren’t backed up in traditional ways.
Archives and backups procedures/programs are typically underfunded and understaffed and under inspected.
But, you can usually assume the worst from Government agencies because they get high ranked political appointees who’s job it is to keep things from being figured out. High ranked career employees will not risk their jobs by whistleblowing so turn their heads away. The ones that don’t are the ones you hear in the news under soul crushing reprisals by fellow works, superiors and even leaks to news papers who gleefully publish suspiciously sourced hit pieces.
“No backups? How freaking incompetent.”
Everybody does “backups”.
How many actually try doing a restore?
Are you currently running on a system you restored from backup?
If not, you’ve never actually done a full test of your recovery procedures.
And that means you don’t actually have a backup system.
If not convenient.
How freaking convenient. There should be backup drives and/or tapes off-line sitting in locked, environmentally controlled storage.
That would have required a separate contract from the one Lockheed-Martin had for maintaining the data.
It probably would have gone to Northrop or Boeing, which means their computer systems wouldn't have been compatible...
...which means there would have been a need for a THIRD contract, to determine compatibility between systems, this one going to Cisco...
...THEN there would have been a FOURTH contract, to Halliburton, enact the compatibility studies.
This would have led to a FIFTH contract, to the RAND Corporation, to see if it was effective.
So, you see, the Air Force was actually a "good steward" of public funds!