American military veterans have been put at risk again. An unencrypted hard drive associated with eVetRec—the system veterans use to access their health records and discharge papers—was sent first for repairs then for recycling without being wiped of 76 million veterans’ records.

The hard drive failed last November and was returned to the contractor that sold it to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). When the contractor was unable to fix the drive, the contractor sent it to another company for recycling.

NARA is investigating the data breach, but a spokesperson for the agency said the lost drive presents no risk because contractors sign privacy pledges.

Hank Bellomy, a NARA information technology manager, claims he tried to hide the useless hard drive in his safe to keep it from being sent back to the contractor with the data still intact. Bellomy was later forced to take a long-term leave, and the hard drive fell into other hands.

That particular hard drive wasn’t the last to fail, nor the first to be sent out for repair without being purged of data, Bellomy said.

“We have no clue how many drives have been sent back over the past seven years since this system was in place.”

NARA now requires that sensitive media be destroyed in-house.

In May, NARA reported it lost another hard drive containing with more than Clinton administration records and more than 100,000 names, addresses and Social Security numbers of White House employees, visitors and contacts.

The hard drive in that incident went missing from a workspace accessed by more than 100 people including janitors, visitors and others.

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