Computer Crashed New Orleans Real Estate Market 234
sustik writes "For a month now the New Orleans real estate market has been crippled by a computer crash that caused the loss of online data from the late 1980s that should be researched prior to the closing of any real estate transactions. 'The clerk of Orleans Parish Civil District Court said Tuesday that her office continues to make progress in resolving the computer problems that have been holding up real estate transactions in New Orleans for the past month, but there still was no indication of how soon the crisis might end.'"
Just make the data visible to Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Their problem is that they've lost indexing data, not the underlying documents. So just make the documents, which are public records, visible to Google. Google will index them and anyone can then search.
Re:I call shenanigans! (Score:5, Interesting)
When I see the phrase "The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST," I interpret that to mean that they still have the deeds, surveys, sale contracts, liens, covenants and easements on file, on paper, in a cabinet.
Which is good. It just means they'll have about 30 years of data entry to do...
Re:Are some people stupid? (Score:1, Interesting)
All of this relies on competent management, which is not a given in local .gov.
We had this happen to us early this year. Our senior management never passed up the failing status of our backup systems, or our proposals to replace them. Fortunately, we had documented our efforts to escalate the problem, so they got fired instead of us.
Re:So how do you verify backups? (Score:4, Interesting)
What would have been due diligence on the part of the court clerk to verify that i365 was doing their job?
Q: How does a non-techie manager determine when something isn't working?
A: They don't. They wait until it breaks.
i365 signed a contract. That was the due diligence.