In this case, I’m somewhat sympathetic to what he’s saying, because DR tapes are usually for system-wide crashes, and not just individual email accounts. However, personal email accounts should be stored on network and not an individual hard drive to prevent this very thing from happening.
Yes. There is no way these emails were stored on a single hard drive. Furthermore, they’re all recoverable. That this doesn’t bother any Democrat, at any level, whether elected or rank and file, illustrates that we’re heading for Civil War.
Even if it is a disaster-recovery backup which can only be restored in full, not by individual mailbox, they could (fairly) easily restore the backup to a Recovery Storage Group for the purposes of mounting the database and retrieving the emails from an individual account.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124961%28v=exchg.65%29.aspx