Dallas Police have found out that the crime data that is missing
from the city’s computer database is almost triple the initial estimate. This
was revealed in an ongoing audit of the said data, city officials said on
Monday.

“About 15 terabytes of police data are missing besides the
7.5 terabytes initially thought to be lost. The City continues to assess the
impact of the compromise on its operations, whether data recovery specialists
can recover data from the physical devices on which it had been stored or other
systems, and whether any additional systems citywide have been affected,” city
spokesperson  Janella Newsome said.

“As the City continues this audit, it may find additional
files are missing,” Newsome added, according to the Dallas Morning News.

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City officials ordered the audit after Dallas County
prosecutors learned that a city information technician inadvertently deleted 22
terabytes of crime data. Technicians recovered 14 terabytes, but about 7.5
terabytes were likely lost forever, the Associated Press reported.

 Most modern personal
computers can hold half a terabyte to one or two terabytes.

City information technology officials became aware of a
massive loss of data on criminal cases on April 5. The police and city IT
departments did not reveal it to the district attorney’s office until earlier
this month after prosecutors inquired why they could not find computer files on
pending cases.

The lost data included images, video, audio, case notes and
other information gathered by police officers and detectives, according to a
Dallas Police Department statement. A city IT employee was migrating the files,
which had not been accessed for the previous six to 18 months, from an online,
cloud-based archive to a server at the city’s data centre.

“While performing the data migration, the employee failed to
follow proper, established procedures, resulting in the deletion of the data
files,” according to the police statement.

The IT employee was fired Friday, according to an email sent
to City Council members from Elizabeth Reich, the city’s chief financial
officer. That employee’s identity has not been made public.

At least one murder trial has been postponed indefinitely
and the suspect was released on bond because of lost data.