Police investigations have revealed that the break-in last night at the public library might've had more personal motives than expected. A library-wide selection of records have been wiped, relating to what books have been checked out and what late fees are applicable. There has also been a swap of hardware, evidently.
During a routine maintenance task this morning, IT personnel realized that there were date discrepancies with the database. Head of library IT, Gerald Benoulli, offered explanation: "We keep a differential backup - that is, we record what's different between today and yesterday. This goes back about 3 months; every quarter we do a full backup. What's happened here is that about two weeks of differentials have been removed. Since everything is cumulative, that data is missing permanently.
When asked about how difficult a task this would be, Gerald stated that it confounded him. "It's not an easy task. Because of our versioning system, you can't just 'remove' a couple weeks. You have to restore to the last full point, then apply everything except those two weeks. This is a process that would've taken two to three hours, in addition to identical hard disks."
In response to his statements, police cross-referenced current hardware profiles with purchasing records. They found a discrepancy between the currently installed hard disks and the ones that had been purchased. Investigating officer Sheridan Drogo stated that this was "baffling. Evidently, the perpetrator broke in with about eight hard drives [...] and installed them with the differenced backup."
Because this is sensitive information, police have begun investigating everyone connected with the library. There have been no other traces found, however. More reports as the investigation unfolds.
