Miami County still closed after server crash, third this year

“The hard drive was so badly damaged that we couldn’t get the information off of it that causes us to help operate,” he said. “We sent it to a company that does data recovery and working on getting it recloned to a new hard drive. As soon as we get that back and get it plugged in, it’ll be brought back up.”

Commissioner Larry West said the company was Kroll Ontrack. Francis did not have a figure as to how much the service cost. He also said he was “hoping by Tuesday morning” to have the county operation again, but that it was instead “looking like Wednesday morning.”

He maintained that no data was lost in the failure.

With the server down, work once again came to a standstill for some offices in the courthouse.

Miami County Prosecutor Bruce Embrey said the crash was “intolerable.”

“It’s just a waste of everybody’s time effort and money,” he said.

“It’s very frustrating. It’s happened too often and the commissioners need to take some action,” he said. “The IT committee, I believe, will have some recommendations for them. I hope they listen to the IT committee.”

He said he’d like to “see a permanent fix to this” in reference to the ongoing technical issues.

“They got a report from the company they hired to evaluate (the server). I’d like to see that report. I believe the report says, in the summary I got, that the system is not well put together,” he said. “I’d like to see it redesigned and see people managing the system that understand servers and networks.”

Chief Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Sinkovics said the network being down nearly spelled disaster for him Thursday night.

“Often times in the middle of the night, you get calls and you have to do a search warrant,” he said. “Thursday night, I got a call to do a search warrant. My printer is on the network. I’ll come in the middle of the night and do a search warrant. I have to print it out there. I couldn’t print it.”

He said the routine was normally to call a judge, go to their house and have the hearing.

“W couldn’t do that. I had to have Judge Tim Spahr come here and I had to email with a private a email a search warrant to him for him to print off in his office to bring down there and then we had to have the hearing here because I don’t have a printer,” he said. “All my stuff is saved on the network.”

He said the warrant for a “blood draw for an OWI (operating while intoxicated),” which he said had a “three-hour time limit for it to be admissible in court from the time of driving.”

“We were cutting it really close,” he said. “Thankfully it wasn’t a serious OWI, but had it been a fatality, if you don’t get that search warrant and blood draw actually taken within 3 hours, it can be inadmissible in court. We still got it done in time, but had it been a fatality, it could have been really bad.”

He said the downed network had been “very frustrating.”

“I was sitting there thinking ‘this could have been a disaster,’” he said.

Zoning Administrator Tammy Gamble said people couldn’t currently get building permits unless it was for electrical additions – “anything that’s not involving an actual structural change.”

“We don’t have any way to find out what their lot lines are,” she said. “I can’t even go into the program that does my permits.”

She said she was instead “catching up,” having just cleaned up a storage area.

Gamble said she had turned “just a couple” of people away who had come to the courthouse.

“It’s not been too bad. Most people call ahead of time,” she said. “Fortunately, the other times it went down we were in low time of the season. Now it’s not. We’re in the middle of prime building season.”

She said it wasn’t “horribly awful” for her, “but for the taxpayer it is.”

“They make a trip in here to get what they need and they can’t get it,” she said. It’s frustrating for us to not to do what we need to do to help them. I’ll just be happy when my computer works again.”

However, some offices were working close to normal Monday.