From BoingBoing (emphasis added):
A technician reformatting a hard drive at the Alaska Department of Revenue accidentally erased the back up drive. What really sucked though is that the tape backup of the backup turned out to be corrupted. Apparently, the cost to painstakingly restore the data from hardcopy was more than $220,000. Nobody was punished for the human error.
Link: Boing Boing: Accidental hard drive erasure cost Alaska $220k
Original story from CNN/AP: Oops! Technician's error wipes out data for state fund
I don't know the specifics of this case, but most of the time when the media reports "human error" as the cause of some data loss, plane crash, nuclear power plant accident or other technological calamity, further investigation reveals that bad design is a bigger factor.
Don Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, cites the common example of deleting files (and I am probably paraphrasing this badly). Everyone has done this: you tell it to delete a file, the computer says "Are you sure?" and you immediately hit "Yes" without thinking. Then you realize you meant "No". The confirmation dialog is pretty much useless; we can't switch contexts so quickly. Our brain is still thinking "delete the file". The solution is a better design: don't really delete the file -- put it in a trashcan/recycle bin.
People make mistakes all the time. Computer systems need to be designed with this in mind. In the Alaska data case, I would bet that the system made it dangerously easy for this to happen. It's also not uncommon for a backup to fail at the same time as the main system; mostly this happens because backups rarely get tested or used.
So, stop blaming the user! Often they're just a victim of bad design.
Other related reading: The Human Factor by Kim Vicente, Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow.
A related New Yorker cartoon "Human Error: Again"
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