Lerner Hard Drive Was "Scratched"

The House Ways and Means Committee ^ | Tuesday, July 22, 2014

[CA Conservative]

Tapes? TAPES? Didn’t the IRS spend billions a decade or so ago to redo their computers and they still use TAPE backup?

Using tape for data archiving and disaster recovery purposes is still quite common, although with the cost of large-capacity drives coming down, data is often archived on disks or other storage media now.

[Askwhy5times]

Via Yahoo:

[Neidermeyer]

“scratched” ,,, I have only heard that term associated with tape storage (and I was a datamanagement pro) ,, meaning that a tape dataset has been marked in the catalog (ie. the “TMC” or tape management catalog) as being available for re-use, it is a “scratch” volume ... obviously the data is still on the tape until it is reused and possibly after re-use if the data put on the volume is small... although you would need special utilities to read past the eof marker.

[Labyrinthos]

And still no special prosecutor.

[piroque]

Duh,,, I’m not the smartest but I’m not that stupid.

[PJBankard]

Emails are not stored on a local PC’s hard drive.

That statement is not entirely correct. The Outlook Exchange server would be the primary location to pull the archived emails; however, Microsoft Outlook will save a copy of the emails to the local disk. If Lerner ever opened Microsoft Outlook on a computer a copy of any email in her Mailbox would be saved to that machine unless it was specifically deleted.

[pieceofthepuzzle]

Can you imagine telling an IRS auditor that you can’t provide the receipts thy want because you had scanned them all into your computer, for safe keeping, but then the hard drive got ‘scratched’, and you were told the data was unrecoverable, so you had the hard drive ‘recycled’ (because it’s the green thing to do)?

[ViLaLuz]

Why all the focus on hard drives? To mislead everyone away from the fact all email traffic is primarily stored on mail servers and archived?

[Logical me]

If the internal disk in the HD are not damaged this disk can be installed in another equal hard drive and data recovered. It would be the same method as restoring a hard drive the hard way. Then placed in a PC that has the same OS and software problem solved. Lots of work but it can be done.

[Neidermeyer]

the tape drives were back they were the old vacuum units that threaded the tape.
*********************
3420’s = roundtape ,,,, 3480’s and newer were cartridge tape

been there done that with recovery .. usually at 4am with the data needed yesterday...

[kcvl]

“Ha! Try calling their help line at tax time...everyone has a different answer.”

You can say that again! every. single. one.!!!

[smokingfrog]

She should have used a big magnet, but a nail file would work once you take the thing apart.

(no - I don’t believe a smidgen of this fairy tale)

[rabidralph]

You scratched my CD.

[Neidermeyer]

The biggest issue was usually RACF as it did weird things with tapevols datasetnames ... but I had “special” “operations” and “auditor” ...