The Ministry of Education, British Columbia, Canada posted MISSING DRIVE CONTENTS:
Despite extensive physical and electronic searches, the Ministry of Education has been unable to locate an unencrypted external hard drive with a variety of reports, databases, and some information detailed below.
The missing external drive is a black Western Digital drive about 7-inches high, 5.5 inches deep, and two inches thick. The disk has 437 GB worth of material made up of 8,766 folders with 138,830 files.
Inside some of the files is information on a total of 3.4 million individuals from between 1986-2009
The red color was in the original.
I’m not sure how listing the contents in detail is going to help find this drive but I do have a local copy should the online version disappear.
If I had to guess, someone converted the drive to home use and formatted it, losing the data of concern unless you want to pay for expensive data recovery efforts.
But, in the event it was stolen and sold along with other equipment, check any second hand Western digital drives you have purchased. Could be worth more than you paid for it.
I first saw this in a tweet by Dissent Doe today and I have no date for the actual data loss.