The key issue that you’re missing is that when a local PST file gets some bad sectors, the entire PST file is corrupted. While the data is on each sector and no, it’s not a nice neat 1 email per sector, they are smeared all over the place.
It’s entirely plausible that without a data recovery team doing a full recovery of the drive, that the entire outlook PST file, which would include every email, sent or received, would be lost.
There are repair tools that can help fix broken pst files, but frankly, I’ve rarely had them work.
Had they sent the drive to a data recovery specialty service, every bit of the drive not in a crashed sectors would have been recovered.
The entire incident is not plausible however. 7 people all losing their drives at the same time is BS. That said, run of the mill IT guys who manage outlook servers don’t have the tools to do a full disaster recovery on a crashed disk.
Gee I have had 4 computers over the last 10 years at my office and I have every email that sent or received on my hard drive and backed up on my companies server. I am always amazed that I can find them so easy. SOMEBODY IS LYING TO PROTECT ?
Good point. Usually if it is a corrupted PST you can make a copy but can’t open (or if it opens it typically freezes up Outlook as it’s trying to parse the database). If it’s a bad drive the file copy fails with a “zero redundancy error” error meaning it can’t read the source file in order to create a copy elsewhere.
The problem I have with all of this is that many folks are falsely visualizing this like a mailbox at the post office. New messages may pass through it but once removed they’re gone. This is (IMO) a false analogy.
If the IRS is operating within the law a copy of EVERY message is retained by the server no matter where the delivery mailbox is defined (such as a personal folder or PST). This means that not only would Lois’s hard drive have to suffer an unrecoverable crash (including recovery at a forensic level) but so would all of the servers along with the tape (or SAN) backup. In other words, a virtual impossibility.
The short answer and the one that Paul Ryan was surprisingly vocal about is that they are lying. To our faces.
Baldfaced lies.
Whatcha gonna do about?
Two weeks later, she said the drive had been sent to a forensic lab for a final attempt, and a few days after that Ms. Wilburn delivered the fatal news: “The sectors on your hard drive were bad which made your data unrecoverable.” Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/17/lois-lerner-irs-hard-drive-crash-sometimes-stuff-j/#ixzz35JGiCHKs Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter/blockquote>