A crashed disk and a backup failure caused the Gwinnett County Recorder’s Court to temporarily lose a month’s worth of data, the court’s clerk said.
No data was permanently lost and the incident was not an outside data breach. It was caused by an unexpected failure in the internal digital system.
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The recorder’s court handles mostly traffic tickets and other citations — nearly 71,000 in 2018, an average of more than 5,900 a month, according to the court. Clerk of Recorder’s Court Jeff West estimated about 10,000 cases could have been affected by the data loss.
Fines from those tickets and citations can usually be paid online, over the phone or in person. But when the court discovered a disk crashed and hadn’t been backed up for a month, it caused delays and confusion in day-to-day operations, West said.
Disks containing recorder’s court data are supposed to be backed up every day, and the court also maintains paper records. But when a disk crashed in late August, the court discovered the most recent backup was a month old. The backup failure was due to “a miscommunication between different departments,” West said.
Because of the paper records, the data wasn’t lost for good. It took the county about a month and 11 part-time temporary workers to re-enter the data into the digital system.
Over that month, the data loss made it difficult for people to pay their tickets over the phone or online. People could not find their cases online, increasing the volume of calls to the court and causing longer delays. The court’s deputy clerks would have to find many callers’ cases in the paper records and put them back into the digital system so people could pay fines over the phone and online, West said. The cases could not be re-entered until three days before an assigned court date, causing further delays.
As of Sept. 26, the recorder’s court had just finished re-entering the lost data, and operations were returning to normal, West said.
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