[FunkyZero]

If I remember right, they said the emails were “lost” about 2 years ago. I’ve been in IT for 25 years and I’ve never seen anyone with a backup rotation that long. Typically, it’s only 3 months, then the media is overwritten... be it tape or disk, it’s simply not feasible to keep backups that long, especially data in the massive volumes we are talking in this case. In the case of magnetic tape, they don’t even have a stable shelf life that long

[FredZarguna]

All I can say is that you must have worked for some very rinky-dink outfits. In university and corporate locations where I was a manager or system programmer, our start-of-month backups never went back less than five years.

[dirtboy]

Here's the problem. We were told back in March by the head of the IRS that they were actively trying to recover the emails. If their account is correctly, they would have know long before then that the emails could not be retrieved.

All they had to do was pull out a full backup set from their sequence and replace it with new, blank tapes, and let the rotations continue. They did not. IMO, that was deliberate. They took multiple steps to ensure the emails would age off the back end of the backup cycle with no archive and no local copy.