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If this is an IT “expert” why are they still talking about *A* hardrive instead of servers and backup?

Because it is very possible to have employees download emails from the server and remove the original. It is a terrible practice, but the IT "expert" is allowing the benefit of the doubt here.

The IRS uses Microsoft Exchange. They claim to have had a ridiculously low mailbox size quota. IIRC it was something like 500MB. As soon as Lerner gets to about 450MB she gets a warning that her mailbox is almost full and she needs to archive older items to her local hard drive. Once this is done, the original is removed from the server and stored on her local drive in an Outlook PST file. It is no longer accessible to any computer besides the local one.

I don't use mailbox size quotas on my Exchange server, but I do occasionally ask people that are at 10GB or more to clean up useless emails and archive things older than a year or two. Once they do that, the emails disappear from the server.

Because of the emphasis on public record, the IRS should have been storing monthly backups of their servers and not reusing them. Normally, I'd rotate and reuse backup tapes daily and then make a storable backup at the end of the month. This backup would be held for however many years retention period is required. This is the backup tape investigators should be trying to track down.

Even if the IRS has created and held monthly backup tapes, it's possible that Lerner has completely skipped the archive step and just has all of her emails downloaded to her local hard drive. This would be silly since she then couldn't check her email on any other device, but it is possible. If this is the case, no backup tape is going to help them find the email.

Agencies like the IRS where public record is so important should have better policies than this. But they don't.

Very interesting, thanks for the information.

I thought the IRS did have the legal responsibility to preserve their official emails (and they were only supposed to do those on their government supplied computers or phones) and also to turn correspondence over to the National Archivist at some point or at least let him know why they couldn’t do so. Not that the law matters to the folks at the IRS.

in the time frame they are talking about a 500MB quota is a large quota on an Exchange 2003 server and was considered a best practice in Corporate Land. Now if you are expected to retain documents for a long time, you had to buy an add-on to Exchange to save the emails on another server. With the advent of Exchange 2010 and 2013 plus Office 365, that no longer applies. Also, if the heads crash on a hard drive, recovery is going to cost around $2K and you are going to have a hard time recovering complete files off of it.

Everything belonging to an individual in government, e.g, the desktop computer is handled in two ways.

First, mapped drives that redirect everything the user thinks they are putting onto their hard drive is stored on the servers in Personal Folders. Standard Government practice in the US Department of State.

Secondly, many users are finding their entire desktop is only a platform to allow their User Profile to boot from a virtual server - so nothing actually resides on the desktop. As virtual servers become more widespread, this technology is also being implemented just because of the Security and Complete Control it allows both System's Administrators and those who perform as Information Systems Officers and Security Officers; the Network Admins also love it because it is difficult to hack or damage virtual servers or disrupt the networks - everything is running on a different machine from the one with the IP address.

Team Obama was stupid to Diss the Systems Administrators and Systems Security Officers.