Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

On Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021, Chambers County Probate Judge Paul Story announced that the probate office experienced what he described as a “critical failure” with its computer server, eliminating the ability to conduct business with vehicle tags, business licenses or any other filings.

Story updated the Chambers County Commission on the server failure during their Monday work session and meeting.

“We had a critical failure on our server,” Story said. “Something that shouldn’t have occurred, all three of our data drives failed simultaneously.”

Story told the commission the operating system remained in tack but unable to function correctly and was rebuilt over the course of four days.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the tag system is up and running, and the tax system is expected to be back up and running by Wednesday afternoon.

The lost or corrupted data, Story said, is currently being recovered by data recovery service OnTrack.

Fortunately, Story says the data is not a total loss as the probate office was running their own server that included information before January 2021.

“Fortunately, we had our own server still running in the rack,” Story said. “So, we maintain data from December 2020 back, so it’s not a total loss.”

The failed server had been purchased in December 2020 and was still under a three-year warranty through Hewlett-Packard(HP).

At this time, there will be no expense for the rebuild of the server or the data recovery through OnTrack.

Story told the Valley Times-News that due to the nature of the outage caused by the server malfunction, he is able to give an extension until Dec. 17 on tag renewals.

For the most part, Story says this will only impact fleet vehicles and new car purchases.

Story said services for tag sales resume Wednesday.