Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust revealed that a technician's mistake on August 18 overwrote its maternity records database while attempting to copy a radiotherapy database for reporting purposes. The error used outdated instructions meant for another system, and a setting that should have been updated was missed, causing the maternity database covering September 2011 to November 2022 to be wiped instead. While clinical notes, test results and observations were largely recovered, the trust says it cannot restore full logs showing who accessed maternity records during that 11-year period.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-22
Three copies, two kinds of media, one off-site. The rule is old because it keeps surviving the specific ways people actually lose files.
gokawiil.com
· 2026-09-22
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates regions was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes on data centers six months ago. AWS said one of three UAE availability zones and all three Bahrain zones suffered damage beyond what its backup systems could withstand, and it remains unable to restore access to some resources.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-17
The author recounts a childhood incident in which a family photo archive stored solely on an external hard drive was wiped after the drive was reformatted for use with a set-top box. The photos were eventually recovered, but the episode became a lasting lesson about the fragility of single-copy data storage.
filipovski.net
· 2026-09-16
Microsoft ended free premium Office licenses for smaller nonprofits worldwide, and many organizations discovered their stored data—including Word, Excel, and OneDrive files—had been permanently deleted without adequate warning. Ronald Khosla, who runs the environmental venture fund Canopy, says he was told by Microsoft support that his data could be recovered, only to later learn it was gone for good.
slate.com
· 2026-08-23