“If this backup system is working, Lois Lerner’s emails are there,”
They’ll say the backup system is NOT working!
“What’s the purpose of backups if you can’t get to them when you need them?
At worst, it may take a day for IT services to restore it but ... too hard to do? Not buying it.”
Probably saved to tape and over the years they got rid of the tape drives.
Before retiring I was a network administrator. Every month we conducted tests of a disaster recovery, restoring tapes. We had bi-annual drills to restore an entire system on foreign equipment - that meant building hardware and remote connections, restoring software and data. You don't back it up unless you know you can use it if needed - quickly. Sounds like the IT staff at IRS needs to be fired and replaced (from management down).
Yea it’s too hard to retrieve. They only do that when it’s something important. /s
I’d say when the emails could lead to the same impeachment charges filed on Nixon for abuse of power, they are important enough to retrieve from the backup.
I guess the Feds don’t have an IT department because Congress won’t provide adequate funding. Maybe that’s the next line of idiotic excuses.
I’ve worked in two different military IT organizations.
Site A had a back-up system and strategy, until Sarge came up one day to say the tape unit was screwed up...but no one reacted to replace the unit....for nine months, and Sarge never mentioned this issue again. Then one day the server was noted with major issues, and Sarge kinda noted the last back-up was nine months ago. We moved Sarge out of the shop, bought a new tape unit the next day, and stressed the significance of the policy.
Site B took a direct power hit and killed the server entirely (we had various strategies to prevent such a hit, but they were all overcomed by the event). We had a new server in a box, a back-up tape from twenty-four hours prior, and one single guy had everything back on line in ten hours. We lost roughly six hours of potential new data.
Everything is totally dependent on the team involved. For the IRS folks....I’d fire the whole IT department if this was my crew.