This makes no sense, you don’t store email on personal computers, unless the user elects to store them for personal reference on their hard drive. The email is stored on a server, and should be backed up in case of drive failure. For DoD, I can speak from experience that Email is stored on a network of central servers that are backed up very frequently and in multiple copies.
In the hearing today with t he Archivists the attorney who worked at both the IRS and White House indicated that it was Lerner’ s laptop that crashed. That means she moved or created all the emails to outside agencies on that laptop and deleted them from her desktop or prevented them from getting on the hard disk.
They also said they encrypt their files. So that would mean that the hard drive that crashed would probably be encrypted. Probably so m etching ancient based upon the state of the rest of their systems. I don’t know enough about recovery of material from an.encrypted hard drive especially in critical sectors to the encryption, but that could complicate recovery. That said it would be a standardized encryption which they would know well and be able to recreate most of it. Now if they didn’t have her correct passwords that could be a real problem.