MORIOKA, Iwate Pref. — Cities have begun storing resident information on servers in distant locales or in the clouds after major data losses in last year's Tohoku region disasters.

Communities in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures lost their computer servers containing records of residents and taxes in the massive tsunami, while residents of towns around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant were forced to evacuate, causing problems in confirming their fate and obtaining official documents.

Fujieda, Shizuoka Prefecture, started storing residential and financial data on servers in Miyakojima, its friendship city in Okinawa, in April.

Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, will start cloud services January to allow locales access to files on remote servers via a special network.