But court's technology staff should have had backup copies, outside contractor says
The Orleans Parish civil court clerk said her original estimates for the number of New Orleans real estate records lost in an October computer crash were vastly overstated, and heading into Christmas, about 85 percent of the records have been restored.
Meanwhile, e-mail messages obtained in a public records request show that a vendor hired to back up the records is blaming the Civil District Court's technology staff for the failure to have extra copies of the data available after the Oct. 25 crash.
Civil District Court Clerk Dale Atkins had positive news Wednesday about the data recovery process for those whose real estate dealings have been severely hampered for months by the data loss. Instead of the 60,000 lost conveyance records Atkins first reported missing, she now estimates the number at about 35,000, and a contractor hired last month to fix the problem has already completed work on nearly 30,000 of them.
But real estate agents, home buyers and sellers aren't out of the woods yet.
Without a complete and verified database of both conveyance and mortgage records, title companies can't be sure that a person trying to sell a property truly owns it free and clear. And the mortgage record database, which is separate from the one for conveyance records, is still missing about 100,000 documents.
Atkins hired the same contractor, the Windward Group, to restore both sets of records, but engaged the firm to deal with the conveyance records about a month before negotiating an agreement for re-entering the mortgage records. The Windward Group has restored close to 20,000 mortgage documents, Atkins said.
Still, Atkins said the company remains on track to finish both projects by its Jan. 2 contractual deadline. She promised she and her staff would continue to work extended hours and add more people to stay on track.
Several devastating problems occurred in rapid succession when the real estate records crisis hit, raising serious questions about the court's computer systems, staff and contractors.
Close to 20,000 mortgage documents have been restored, Civil District Court Clerk Dale Atkins saysThe computer system is run and managed by the Civil District Court, entirely separately from the clerk's office, but the clerk is the custodian of the documents. There are paper versions of the records controlled by the clerk, but they are nearly impossible to locate without the computerized indexes controlled by the court's judges.
The court changed computer backup vendors in August 2009, and when the new firm, i365, sent a software update for backing up the records earlier this year, the court staff didn't realize it had not installed correctly. Unbeknown to the staff or the contractor at the time, monthly backups stopped functioning during the summer and previous backups were purged from the contractor's system without being replaced.
Judge Piper Griffin, chairwoman of the court's technology committee, has said she "would have expected i365 to recognize" the loss of backup data, adding that she believes the woman in charge of the court's computer systems at the time, Tynia Landry, is not to blame. Still, some on the court were concerned enough that the judges hired a new person to be Landry's boss.
The backup company, i365, has declined to comment on the failure, but an e-mail message from a top corporate executive to Griffin makes the firm's feelings clear, while asking Griffin to stop talking to the news media about what happened.
"The continued exposure of this situation hurts all involved -- i365, Orleans Parish and the Civil District Court," Dave Hallmen, head of i365's Worldwide Sales and Marketing division, wrote to Griffin on Nov. 5. "We have instructed our staff to refrain from publicizing our service call records which support our position that Civil District Court IT personnel failed to properly maintain the on-site software and backup jobs."
Company spokeswoman Marlena Fernandez declined to comment on Hallmen's e-mail message.
Regardless of who was responsible for the loss of backup data, the public records obtained by The Times-Picayune also shed some light on the sorry state of the court's computer system.
"I was unable to get the old server to boot," Landry wrote in a Nov. 1 e-mail message to clerk's office employees, Griffin and others. "The server is in its end of life which means it is no longer under warranty and also the reason why the server is no longer in production. I wish I had better news to report."
The e-mail messages also show that it took more than a full week after three hard drives from two servers were wiped out for Landry to report that a data recovery firm was unable to restore anything. The drives were shipped to another firm Nov. 2, and it took until Nov. 19 to get the hardware functional enough to start working to restore the data.