I heard Meagan McCardle (sp?) interviewed on NPR today, and it sounded a little fishy. She would like us to believe that the IRS server had room for only some number of MB of email data for any one person, and if they wanted to keep more than that, they’d have to download them to a file on their own computer which deleted it from the server.
That sounded awfully convenient, timewise, for Lois Lerner and awfully convenient, timewise, as a new reason just coming out today for why they weren’t on the big email computer in the sky. Oh, that’s right, awfully convenient, timewise, times six for the other people who happened to be doing “personal archiving” at the same time.
Ah here we are. (BTW, can we pass a law to allow us to scream at somebody who begins an answer to a question with “so...” ?)
“So what they did was bad IT management, but it is not uniquely bad IT management. Basically, what they had done is they had set the server so that in 2009, only 150 megabytes worth of mail could be stored in a mailbox. The result of that was that people either had to delete or archive their email. And where they archived it was on their local hard drive. What they say happened is that Lois Lerner was archiving stuff on her local hard drive. That hard drive failed catastrophically. They were unable to recover the emails. And before anyone really knew that this was going to be a target of a congressional investigation, that hard drive was taken out and thrown away because you don’t keep bad hard drives around.”
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/21/324222831/with-irs-email-lost-could-be-more-alarming-than-a-cover-up
I hate to say it, but that does sound similar to the Air Force system. Senior leadership does have a much higher limit, but they also have a higher email volume. If you want to keep emails without exceeding your limit on the Exchange server, you move them to a ,pst on your hard drive, which you hopefully (but probably don’t) back up periodically