There are weekly backups of our exchange mail store. There is no way they lost it. In the event the worst happened, like a perforation of the array that held their exchange mail store, there will still be weeks and weeks of off site backups that have to as far back as they are legally required through federal data retention laws. There is absolutely, positively, no way this is true.
A company the size of the IRS, with their budget, would have high level data and server redundancy. Are we to believe their exchange server and mail store are that vulnerable? If so, people should be going to jail.
I’m an IT consultant and I manage a number of clients networks, computers, email, and storage. Part of my duties includes managing Microsoft exchange, which is the industry standard in corporate email systems. Database corruption happens, especially once a mailbox gets to a certain size, but that is what backups are for. With a corrupted mailbox, some emails can disappear but not the while thing. The email database, or mail store, sits on a server with an array of disks that are setup to handle hard drive failures. There are examples of losing an entire array. One is called a perforation where the array will replicate a bad block, or hard disk sector, across all of the disks. This actually happened to a client recently and we rebuilt the array, restored from backup, and one day was lost.
An organization this size would likely have redundant arrays setup to so that if one failed, the other would cut over. its called storage clustering and it can be done in all kinds of interesting ways to protect customer data and ensure zero downtime. I don’t know if a perforation or corruption could be replicated in this manner. I’ve only seen perforation happen once and that was on a single array.
The IRS IT policies need an immediate audit. I want to know what mailstore Lerners emails sat on and who else was in it. Turn in every computer, every device, every inventory sheet where Lerner worked. Which computer was hers, is it still in production, did she locally archive her email? Was a case called in to Microsoft to resolve this? A loss like this should instantly trigger this considering their size and scope and the ramifications of such a loss. Shut the entire IRS down until this is sorted out. If this is true, this organization should be done for.
Best post yet on this matter! Thank you.