...Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz needled Koskinen about a short-term data backup that the IRS had in place in 2011 when Lerner's hard drive crashed, but never used.
'It's actually a disaster recovery system,' the IRS commissioner testified, 'and it backs up for six months in case the entire system goes down ... That was the rule in 2011. Policy.'
Chaffetz wanted to know 'why didn't they just go to that six-month tape?'
Koskinen replied that it is a disaster recovery tape that has all of the emails on it, and is a very complicated tape to actually extract emails [from], but I have not seen any emails to explain why they didn't do it. So I It would be difficult, but I don't know why they didn't do it.'...
They had/have them ALL from her work computer, but "it's complicated".
BTW - real IT professionals don't get to use the "it's complicated" excuse.
If you work for IRS IT, it's a different story, apparently. Good thing federal government workers have a 95%+ retention rate, because the private sector doesn't hire "pretend" IT "professionals"...
Why only keep backups for 6 months? Tape is cheap.
-—’It’s actually a disaster recovery system,’
If the IRS had proper leadership and respect for the people, they would have considered this sorry crapalooza a disaster to recover from.