Posted on 06/21/2014 1:12:43 PM PDT by Askwhy5times
We have been told Lois Lerner lost 2 years worth of emails due to a crash of her hard drive. We were told the disc had bad sectors and the data could not be recovered.
According to documents provided by the IRS, Lerner was archiving her e-mails on her local hard drive, which developed fatal problems (bad sectors) in the middle of June 2011. The data proved unrecoverable despite heroic efforts on the part of the IT staff.Let's delve into this a little deeper. Exactly what is a hard disc sector?
In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard drives and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs. Newer hard drives use 4096-byte (4 KB) sectors, known as the Advanced Format.A sector is about 4 kilobytes. I checked my email and small text only emails were 2 to 5 kilobytes. large emails or ones with attachments ran into the megabytes. So, if learner lost 1 sector, it would be about 1 small email. This is assuming Lerner had a very modern computer. If it was older, it would take more about 8 sectors to store an email. How many emails did Lerner lose?
We don't know exactly how many are missing because a) they are missing and b) the IRS has managed to retrieve 24,000 of the lost emails by searching through the accounts of dozens of other IRS employees who could have been included in those emails.It would appear that Lois Lerner was a prolific email user. If they lost as many as they recovered (24,000), then Lerner's hard drive would have had to have had as many as 48,000 bad sectors to store the lost emails (both lost and recovered) and this is assuming they are small emails without any attachments and all the bad sectors would have to be in the locations her emails were stored. If they were larger file sizes, the number of bad sectors needed to destroy that many emails rises dramatically. Of course all hard drives, even new ones, likely have some bad sectors. Windows stops writing to them after they are identified.
Overall, the IRS has turned over 750,000 pages of documents in the investigation, including 67,000 emails.
When your computer notices a bad sector, it marks that sector as bad and ignores it in the future. The sector will be reallocated, so reads and writes to that sector will go elsewhere. This will show up as Reallocated Sectors inhard drive S.M.A.R.T. analysis tools like CrystalDiskInfo. If you had important data in that sector, however, it may be lost possibly corrupting one or more files.In order for Lerner to have lost two years of email, there would have had to be severe sudden damage to a large section of Lerner's hard drive because files are not stored in a linear manner on disc.
Each partition is either swap space (used to implement virtual memory) or a file system used to hold files. Swap-space partitions are just treated as a linear sequence of blocks. File systems, on the other hand, need a way to map file names to sequences of disk blocks. Because files grow, shrink, and change over time, a file's data blocks will not be a linear sequence but may be scattered all over its partition (from wherever the operating system can find a free block when it needs one). This scattering effect is called fragmentation.If the IRS claimed they lost a few of Lerner's emails due to disc errors, we might believe that, but two years worth doesn't seem very credible. I smell fish.
fishy? wtf.
Why don’t they ask her to take a lie detector test and get it over with...
Interesting article history:
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:askwhy5times/index?tab=articles
All your own stuff.
Fishy.
Not to worry - the NSA intercepts all emails to protect us from terorist organizations ——— like the IRS
Each partition is either swap space (used to implement virtual memory) or a file system used to hold files. Swap-space partitions are just treated as a linear sequence of blocks. File systems, on the other hand, need a way to map file names to sequences of disk blocks. Because files grow, shrink, and change over time, a file's data blocks will not be a linear sequence but may be scattered all over its partition (from wherever the operating system can find a free block when it needs one). This scattering effect is called fragmentation.
If the IRS claimed they lost a few of Lerner's emails due to disc errors, we might believe that, but two years worth doesn't seem very credible. I smell fish.
This is good and persuasive info. Have the involved IT folks testified before Congress? If not, one suspects that it is time for that to occur.
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FYI some technical explanation that you may want to pass along
The key issue that you’re missing is that when a local PST file gets some bad sectors, the entire PST file is corrupted. While the data is on each sector and no, it’s not a nice neat 1 email per sector, they are smeared all over the place.
It’s entirely plausible that without a data recovery team doing a full recovery of the drive, that the entire outlook PST file, which would include every email, sent or received, would be lost.
There are repair tools that can help fix broken pst files, but frankly, I’ve rarely had them work.
Had they sent the drive to a data recovery specialty service, every bit of the drive not in a crashed sectors would have been recovered.
The entire incident is not plausible however. 7 people all losing their drives at the same time is BS. That said, run of the mill IT guys who manage outlook servers don’t have the tools to do a full disaster recovery on a crashed disk.
I post in Bloggers and personal and I posted in it’s entirety. If you don’t like it, don’t bother clicking it. I could care less what you think.
Gee I have had 4 computers over the last 10 years at my office and I have every email that sent or received on my hard drive and backed up on my companies server. I am always amazed that I can find them so easy. SOMEBODY IS LYING TO PROTECT ?
Well.. keep working on it and when you DO care less.. as you said you could.. let me know.
Every freeper and conservative ( you too Rush and Palin, levin and savge ) repeat after me:
Barack Obama you socialist tyrannical monster, I demand your resignation immediately
Only this evil, socialist,kenyan creature is responsible for the IRS oppressing good conservative freedom loving conservatives
impeach Obama now
Barack Obama you socialist tyrannical monster i demand your resignation immediately
i Hate all democrats
The IRS leadership is full of GIGO. Just about the whole Govt is one big corrupted bad sector. Here’s hoping and praying some Wizard IT braniac can restore those ‘lost e-mails’ from Low-us unLearnher.
If they are using outlook with exchange server, the mail is stored on the server and mirrored on the client. The mail servers are backed up nightly and copies of backups are kept all over the place. It is almost impossible to lose email.
Every laptop and desktop you own can burst into flames and the mail is still on the server and on backup tapes. If I delete all of the mail in my mailbox, it will be deleted from the server but it goes into a ‘dumpster’ on Exchange and can be undeleted for several days or weeks depending on the admin settings of the server. And if that doesn’t work, someone can get the backup tapes and restore it.
> Why dont they ask her to take a lie detector test and get it over with...
Because pathological liars can pass them. No doubt at all that Obama would...
The Internet provider saves every email, and so does NSA. Emails are never, ever lost. Destroying the hard drive only makes it more time consuming to locate emails for anyone who wants them.
Check out this email from my inbox several days ago:
"As a fed employee I know that emails are not kept on computers (not even our issued ones). We have to log in to the main frame to access our emails. Cannot read or write without being logged in.
"My dinosaur laptops have crashed three times and BEEN REPLACED; my emails are STILL THERE. Even from years ago."
Why can’t they do a reverse search? That is the receipients of her e-mails?
I know they are claiming their hard drives also crashed but that is such BS-—the IRS has spent big tax dollars on their computer systems its almost impossible to fathom the totally lost e-mail claims.
Just remember what happened to Michael Mahon Hastings when he crossed Obama! He found a tree..and died.
The most sinister part of the whole deal is everybody knows it’s a lie and a setup, but everybody also knows it’s somewhat plausible.
Congress has jurisdiction over the IRS right? Pink tie Boner should order up a full review of the IRS technology and get some outside techno saavy minesweepers in there and bypass the liars in control. Tampering with evidence is criminal and Low-us Liar pled the 5th cuz she’s got something to hide.
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