The City of Dover is working to resolve a data loss issue.
The data loss is causing delays in payments including real estate and lodging taxes and stormwater refunds as well as committee and financial reporting.
The data loss is not a security concern and personal information and data are not at risk, according to city officials. It also doesn’t impact utility bills.
Dover’s Public Affairs and Emergency Management Coordinator Kay Sass said these issues started on Jan. 15 and progressed from there.
“Our biggest hurdle that we faced was overnight [Wednesday into Thursday], they worked through the night – our staff and vendors – to restore the remaining parts of the server… Our hope is that they can restore the data back to January 14.”
City staff and vendors will have additional work to do now that the servers have been restored.
“Then, we'll have to manually put in all of the data from January 14 to whatever day they restore everything to.”
City staff noticed they were having trouble accessing data Jan. 15, and some was completely lost.
During initial efforts to recover the system, city staff and outside vendors discovered several large files had been deleted and there was not enough space to restore everything.
No additional late fees will be assessed for now. Sass said this should be a fairly quick recovery, but staff will have to do a lot of double checking while catching the system back up.
People may continue experiencing delays with vendor payments, lien sheets for attorneys and issuing rental permits.
Sass said nothing like this has happened in Dover before, and staff are working on preventing it in the future.
