IRS Scandal - Lost Emails

[robkelk]

The major points being -
1 - It's highly likely (almost certain, in fact) that the government uses some variant of Microsoft Exchange for their email servers. They have built-in exchange mail database redundancy. So, unless they did not follow Microsoft's recommendations they are lying.

Following that recommendation costs money - taxpayers' money, in this case.

2 - Every IT organization that I know of has hotswappable disk drives. Every server built since 2000 has them. Meaning that if a single disk goes bad it’s easy to replace.

3 - ALL Servers use some form of RAID technology. The only way that data can be totally lost (Meaning difficult to bring back) is if more than a single disk goes before the first bad disk is replaced. In the diagram below you can see that its possible to lose a single disk and still keep the data.

Assuming the data is still there - RAID is not an archive mechanism.

4 - If the server crashed (Hardware failure other than disks), then the disks that contain the DATA for the Exchange database is still available because the server hardware and disks are exchangeable. Meaning that if I have another server with the same hardware in it, I can put the disks in and everything should boot right up.

Again, assuming the data is still there.

Exchange can be set up to automatically delete all emails older than 90 days (or any other number, but that's a typical setting). If nobody archived them, the emails could be gone without any human intervention at all.

5 - All email servers in a professional organization use TAPE backup. Meaning if all the above fails, you can restore the server using the TAPE backups.

Tape backups are optional under CommVault or TSM, the two largest enterprise-backup solutions actually deployed.

Implementing tape backups costs money - taxpayers' money, in this case.

6 - If they are talking about her local PC, ...

Why in the world would enterprise email be stored on a local PC?

All of this can be explained by simple decisions made to save taxpayers' money. Unless you can prove the contrary, you're in tinfoil-hat territory here.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012