Two decades of work disappeared in municipal IT failure

In Åstorp’s central archive, there are documents from the mid-1800s. 25 years ago, it was decided to digitize the archive description. This work now seems to have disappeared after a digital mishap.

In two rooms under the citizen office, the documents are stored in books, binders, and boxes. The purpose of the project has been to make the entire archive collection digitally searchable. For the past 18 years, this has been one of Rasko Jovanovic’s tasks.

If someone contacts and searches for a specific document, he has been able to search for it on the computer and find out if it exists in the archive, as well as on which shelf it is located and how it is stored.

However, it all came to an abrupt end when in September he tried to search for a document and couldn’t access it. After contacting the IT department, it became clear that the program was no longer available – the server had been deleted and even the backup was gone. 25 years of work had disappeared.

– When I realized everything that had happened, I felt completely empty. I felt so bad that I had to go on sick leave. Someone deletes your entire job, that everything can disappear just like that, says Rasko Jovanovic to Helsingborgs Dagblad.

It turned out that the process of deleting the server where the program was located had already begun a year earlier.

Central Åstorp. Photo: Anna Alexander Olsson, CC BY 4.0

Discarded after six months

According to IT manager Thomas Nilsson, servers are not kept running if they are not used by the municipalities, in order to maintain a secure IT environment. Usually, there is a specific person responsible when a server or system that does not seem to be used is found, but in this case, there was no one to contact, so the server was simply shut down.

It will remain shut down for at least six months, but the server itself remains, so if someone requests it, it can be reactivated again – but after six months, it will be discarded.

New procedures

After the incident, it has been decided to ensure that there is always someone responsible for all systems and servers. In the future, an extra backup will also always be taken for servers that are removed and saved for an extended period.

They are now starting the work of creating a new digital inventory of documents from the 1970s onwards.

– That’s what we’re looking at right now, how we can recreate it. Someone needs to go down, look at the shelves, see what documents we have, and then enter it into the system again, says Merih Özbalci, head of administration in Åstorp municipality.