{"id":6443,"date":"2016-07-11T15:38:53","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T05:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/?p=6443"},"modified":"2025-06-12T04:41:28","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T04:41:28","slug":"five-worst-data-loss-disasters-of-all-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/five-worst-data-loss-disasters-of-all-time","title":{"rendered":"Five Worst Data Loss Disasters of All Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Data loss. From burnt up scrolls\u00a0to corrupted servers, data loss has\u00a0plagued humanity since the dawn of written history. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, in the Information Age, we’ve never had so much data at once\u2014or so much to lose. In this article, we look back at the five\u00a0worst data loss disasters in recorded history and what could have been done to avoid them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1. A Criminal Case of Data Loss: UK Government\u00a0Loses Prisoner Data<\/h2>\n

You’d assume that prisons are secure places. Especially prisons run by the UK Government. But in 2009, the UK home office lost confidential information<\/a> on every prisoner in the country<\/em><\/strong>, including more than 40,000 serious offenders who had committed violent and sexual crimes.<\/p>\n

So how did they lose the criminal’s data in the first place? One employee transferred all the data from a secure server onto a USB stick. Then, they lost the USB stick. The USB data was in an unencrypted format.\u00a0This definitely deserves to be on the list of worst data loss disasters.<\/p>\n

The moral of the story:<\/strong>\u00a0Make sure you have\u00a0clear, concise IT security policies, and maybe specify that employees shouldn’t download the entire UK prisoner list onto a USB in unencrypted format.<\/p>\n

2. A Data Disk with 25 Million People’s Personal Details, Lost in Post<\/h2>\n

You’d think the UK Government losing prisoner information was bad. But what was worse was it wasn’t the first data loss scandal in 24 months. The previous year, in 2008, they posted a data disk with the personal records of 25 million individuals… then lost it in transit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This included dates of birth, addresses, bank account and national insurance numbers. Worse, it had the information over all families in the UK claiming child benefit, including information on 15,5 million children. It was also not securely encrypted.<\/p>\n

The moral of the story:<\/strong>\u00a0Nobody should be sending so much critical data via disk and post. Data should be sent digitally in an encrypted format between two trusted sources. The data transfer also should have been registered and recorded.<\/p>\n

3. Data\u00a0on\u00a026 Million US Veterans Lost, Years of Federal Lawsuits<\/h2>\n

The U.S. Government aren’t immune to data loss either. In 2006, a data analyst for the Department of Veterans Affairs had his laptop and external hard drive stolen from his home.<\/p>\n

This might not have been a big deal, except it just so happened to have the personal information of 26.5 million military veterans and military personnel on it. This means names, birthdates, social security numbers, etc.\u00a0It was the largest security breach in U.S. Government history\u2014and one of the worst data loss disasters of modern times.<\/p>\n

The whole\u00a0debacle lead to a nationwide search. Eventually, the laptop was found<\/a>\u00a0after a $50,000 reward was publicly offered. While the FBI announced the data had thankfully not been accessed, the incident lead to a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the men and women whose data was on the laptop.<\/p>\n

After three years\u00a0of litigation, the Department of Veteran Affairs had to pay out $20 million<\/a> over the embarrassing data loss incident.<\/p>\n

The moral of the story:<\/strong>\u00a0Bring your own device (BYOD) is a double-edged sword and a potential security risk. Make sure devices for work are password protected and remote-wipe is enabled, so your IT service provider can shut them down remotely if they’re lost or stolen.<\/p>\n

4. Death of a Social Software\u00a0Star: Ma.Gnolia<\/h2>\n

In terms of global significance, the collapse of\u00a0Ma.gnolia<\/a>\u00a0may seem small. But it is a cautionary tale and the worst data loss disaster to ever hit a business.<\/p>\n

Who is Ma.gnolia, you ask?\u00a0From 2005 to 2009, Ma.gnolia was an up-and-coming social bookmarking website. At the time, it distinguished itself from its competitors with the ability to store snapshots of bookmarked web pages and share groups of bookmarks between users. Among the early adopters of open standards, it was a pioneer in its field, and everyone expected it to take and keep a large chunk of the social bookmarking market share.<\/p>\n

Then, in January 2009, disaster struck. The Ma.gnolia servers lost all their data in a complete outage. Due to data corruption, all user data was irretrievable, rendering the site essentially dead. While they had a single on-site backup, it had duplicated the corruption, and there was no off-site backup to recover their servers from.<\/p>\n

Attempts were made to revive the budding business as ‘Gnolia’, but to no avail. The business was shut down for good in 2010, taken out by a single outage.<\/p>\n

The moral of the story:<\/strong>\u00a0The CEO of Ma.gnolia admitted if the business had an off-site backup, their business wouldn’t have experienced such a data catastrophe. If they’d implemented a\u00a03-2-1 backup strategy<\/a> along with a reliable backup software (e.g. BackupAssist<\/a>), Ma.gnolia would still be around today.<\/p>\n

5. The First Data Loss Disaster: Library of Alexandria<\/h2>\n

It may be shocking for Millennials to hear, but before laptops and PCs, people kept their data stored in books <\/em>(We’re not even talking Kindles here).<\/p>\n

So when the Library of Alexandria<\/a> in Egypt burned down in 300BC, taking with it 500,000 scrolls containing advanced and irreplaceable works of mathematics, astronomy, physics, poetry etc, the data loss was so great we’re still hearing about it over two centuries after the fact. <\/em><\/p>\n

That makes it a strong contender for ‘worst data loss disaster of all time’, don’t you think?<\/p>\n

The moral of the story: <\/strong>Firstly, no\u00a0setting fires in the library. Secondly? Maybe make redundant copies of your works. Having a single copy of each book is just asking for trouble. Computers not being invented is\u00a0no excuse for data loss!<\/p>\n

(Dis)honorable Mentions for Worst Data Loss Disasters<\/h2>\n

Especially in modern history, there’s countless examples of people just not protecting their data properly. Here are some candidates that almost made\u00a0our ‘Worst Data Loss’\u00a0list:<\/p>\n

\u2022 British Royal Navy (2008):<\/strong> In the wake of the UK Government losing 25 million people’s data, a\u00a0British Royal Navy Officer left his laptop in a car… with the details of everyone who applied to join the armed forces (Army, Marines, Air Force) for the last ten years on it. It was stolen<\/a>, along with the 600,000 applicants information.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Daily Mail (2008): <\/strong>During these data loss disasters, the Daily Mail\u00a0was rightly taking these\u00a0“criminally careless” UK\u00a0organizations to task. But then the paper lost one of its laptops<\/a> with the personal information of thousands of its employees on it\u2014including bank account numbers. Those in glass houses…?<\/p>\n

\u2022 Los Alamos (Since always):<\/strong> Almost every five to ten years, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico\u2014where the U.S. conducts nuclear weapons research\u2014somehow experiences data loss. Even though they’ve got a vault for their secure top-secret data, hard drives with nuclear secrets go missing. Sometimes they’re found behind copiers<\/a>\u00a0and staff wait over three weeks<\/a> to disclose the missing drives. Even though these data loss debacles date back to the cold war, \u00a0the U.S. Government has just recently started fining them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Health Net (2011):<\/strong> Health Net, a provider of managed health care services, lost nine server drives <\/em><\/strong>with 1.9 million customer’s personal and health data<\/a>. It contained names, addresses, social security numbers, financial information, and health data of current and former members, employees and health care providers.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Samsung (2014):<\/strong> You’d think a telecommunications titan\u00a0like Samsung would know to back up their data. But in April 2014, it became apparent Samsung didn’t when its data center in South Korea burned to the ground. At first, it seemed like several hours out mobile outage was the worst to come of it… until Samsung realised it had not backed up certain data<\/a> stored only on the South Korean servers. It just goes to show, nobody’s too big to fail.<\/p>\n

What All Of Them Needed!<\/h2>\n

No matter their size or shape, all of these organizations and businesses needed a sound data protection plan. You can avoid making the same costly mistakes by implementing a 3-2-1 Backup strategy<\/a>. Always have three recent backups on two different media, and one off-site backup!<\/p>\n

To do that, you need a reliable backup and recovery software, preferably one that includes high-level AES Encryption in its base package. We recommend BackupAssist<\/a>, especially since\u00a0it offers a 30-day free trial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Data loss. From burnt up scrolls\u00a0to corrupted servers, data loss has\u00a0plagued humanity since the dawn of written history. \u00a0 Now, in the Information Age, we’ve never had so much data at once\u2014or so much to lose. In this article, we look back at the five\u00a0worst data loss disasters in recorded history and what could have … Read more Five Worst Data Loss Disasters of All Time<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,23],"tags":[243,329],"class_list":["post-6443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interest","category-news","tag-data-backup","tag-data-loss"],"yoast_head":"\nWorst Data Loss Disasters in Human History<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Data loss. From scorched scrolls to corrupted servers, data loss is as old as human history. 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