“If the IRS would only turn over the hard drive of Lois Lerner, I would happily be able to restore those lost two years of data. “
This is one of my pet peeves. Unless you specifically ‘save’ an email to your hard drive, NONE of your emails are ‘kept’ on it. Your emails are on large SERVERS.
An individual’s emails are stored on the servers of whatever EMAIL program you use.
An outfit like the IRS has it’s own EMAIL servers where the files are stored.
The “I lost my email because my hard drive failed” is a complete lie. A lie that is probably being kept alive by the ignorance of the media.
This is one of my pet peeves. Unless you specifically ‘save’ an email to your hard drive, NONE of your emails are ‘kept’ on it. Your emails are on large SERVERS.
That depends on how you have your e-mail client set up. For example, I use Thunderbird, and I have directed it to save all sent mail to a folder on my local system. My mail server (which is right behind me) is not configured to save mail on its hard drive, either incoming or outgoing. Period.
But then again, I don't run a business or have any other obligation to save e-mail -- if my hard disk crashes, the only person hurt is me.
Now, I have set up corporate-mail servers where the company is indeed obligated to save all mail, and I used a multi-level backup scheme similar to the one described elsewhere. The mail server stages the saved mail to a cache. On a regular schedule, the cache is written to tape and stored. The cache is sized, usually, to hold the worst-case load of mail for a week. (Including spam that gets through the filters.) Run time to save the mail? The time is measured in single-digit hours.
So, given a court order to search for mail over a two-year period, I would need to run roughly 90 tapes. At two hours per tape (there are a *lot* of mails on each tape), it would take 2000 hours, or roughly 300 days, to process two years of tape. It's just the sheer volume of mail involved that requires that kind of time. LOTS of CPU and I/O processing time. And remember, we are talking about civilian government computers. Unlike the Department of Defense, who stay close to the bleeding edge, I would suspect that all of us on FR each have more powerful computers on our desks than the IRS has in its electronic mail room.
Not to mention that there may be only one or two compatible tape drives in the facility, so the mythical man-month restriction comes into play here. Want to cut it down to three months? Run three shifts. And who pays for the extra manpower? Us, that's who. Oh, yes, buy more tape drives. More money we have to fork out. And what happens to those drives afterward? "Shelf rash." I don't know if the tape drives are available for rental, to throw more people/computers at the problem. Borrow from another agency? With "competitive" bidding? What are the chances that two agencies would buy the same drives? Or compatible drives? The IRS can't outsource the work, because the e-mails have taxpayer data one them. Oops.
Now, this is no excuse for months of delay in providing the e-mails, and I haven't touched on what happens when you extract the relatively small number of e-mails from the tapes. I'm only looking at the initial collection process. But the process is a bit more involved than people might realize.