[philman_36]

My immediate thought was...where are the backups? This is the government we're talking about.
Everything is in duplicate or triplicate.

[philman_36]

See #69.

[drpix]

People would be surprised how often the government has no backups, especially of old records. The VA has conceded this for certain parts of military records covering certain years. The documents Sandy Berger stole had no backups.

With records (including birth records), it is the original documents that are meant to be both the backup and authenticator of computer records.

I would be surprised if records like Immigration entry records, whose number far exceed those of once in a lifetime records (birth/death) would have ever been stored in duplicate. I would be even more surprised if the "coincidence" that caused only the 1 week of records around Obama's birth did not cause that same week to disappear for any duplicate records that might have existed.