Erfurt (dpa/th) - According to a report by MDR Thuringia, around 1,800 electronic documents were accidentally deleted in the Thuringian state administration. The spokesman for the responsible Ministry of Finance told the station that it was electronic documents from the years 2014 to 2021, which reported on Sunday. The causes were a faulty deletion routine in the document management system used by the state data center and short backup periods. The error has been corrected in a newer software version, many of the deleted older documents are still available as paper files.
According to the MDR, the deletions should have happened in May. E-files of the State Chancellery and the Ministry of Justice are particularly affected. The glitch is said to have only been noticed months later, the backup copies had already been overwritten.
Around 40 million documents are stored in the country's document management system. The spokesman told MDR that the findings from the error would help improve the IT infrastructure. However, it is not possible to work completely error-free.
From next year, the state administration, with its more than 10,000 computer workstations, is to work entirely with electronic files. According to the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), the document management system used by the Free State of Thuringia is also used in other German authorities and state administrations.
