A database service call went rather awry when a network specialist accidentally wiped a hard-drive containing Alaska's $38bn Oil Fund. The multi-billion-dollar boner was performed under the watchful eyes of a Dell storage specialist working on a remote desktop session, a report obtained today by The Register has revealed.

In June, Alaska's Department of Revenue attempted to fix errors reported in its Dell/EMC storage system's processors. (The department used a cluster of Dell servers running MS SQL 2005 connected to Dell/EMC storage boxes with approximately 3TB of space.) The technician given the fix assignment \ufffd who mercifully is kept anonymous but herein known as Johnny McBunglepants \ufffd was advised by the Dell specialist to unbind then bind the two partitions (LUNs) that were corrupted after a first attempt to correct the error failed.

Unfortunately, neither administrator managed to correlate which data partition corresponded to which drive letter on the server and moved some files \ufffd notably containing 800,000 PDFs of Alaska's applicant information for an oil-funded sales account \ufffd on to the doomed drive. Both the Dell specialist and McBunglepants missed the error.

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