Bull they erased the tapes on accident. WTF! know how hard it is to erase a tape on accident? lololol yea okay!
“Tapes” are a very generic term used for any offsite media backup. With the modern cloud, it’s feasible that one could remove all of the vaults used to store data, but so much more would be lost than just these data sets unless they created vaults specifically for Tea Party emails.
If, however, they used magnetic media like tapes, yeah, that data’s not lost, and IIRC, groups like Iron Mountain are required to have additional media backups of critical data sets, depending on the contract. I’ve worked for hospitals, and I can tell you they have triplicate backups. The government is lying, plain and simple.
If they followed the Sarbanes Oxley burden they make businesses endure, they would have had to erase a hella lot of tapes to actually lose the data.
Bull they erased the tapes on accident. WTF! know how hard it is to erase a tape on accident? lololol yea okay!
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Normally it would be pretty easy ,, just “expire” the backups so that the tapes are put into the “scratch pool” and re-used... in this case the backup tapes were no doubt identified as needed for an investigation and given a no-expire flag or physically removed to a safe storage location... This was no accident.
Ooops. I just erased all my tax records. For the next ten years.
IRS will accept that excuse based on what they expect us to believe.