Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 12/02/2009 8:57:58 AM PST by Presbyterian Reporter
Also, for the computer gurus on FR I have a question: "Would not the main computer at CRU make a copy of everything on the system every day and keep that information on tape for a long period of time?"
It seems that even if Jones deleted tons of emails, the backup tapes/drives at CRU would still have copies of those emails.
""""In regard to one particularly pesky FOI request, Jones said: "About 2 months ago I deleted loads of e-mails, so have very little — if anything at all." Yet in an interview published last Tuesday in the Guardian, Jones told another story: "We've not deleted any e-mails or data here at CRU. I would never manipulate the data one bit — I would categorically deny that."""""
search first..
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2397321/posts
Yes, in file 1228412429.txt he replies to a message that contains his previous text.
> The inadvertent email I sent last month has led to a Data
> Protection Act request sent by
> a certain Canadian, saying that the email maligned his scientific
> credibility with his peers!
> If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn’t yet) I am supposed to go
> through my emails
> and he can get anything I’ve written about him. About 2 months ago
> I deleted loads of
> emails, so have very little - if anything at all. This legislation
> is different from the FOI -
> it is supposed to be used to find put why you might have a poor
> credit rating !
A lot would depend on whether they ever backed up their mail server, and what kind of server it was. If they were following best practices (and with this bunch, that’s a BIG “if”), then yes, there would be backups of the email system with those emails. However, sometimes “sent” mail is not backed up, so unless you have backups available from all of the mail environments at each location (recall that not all of these “scientists” are in England, many are in other countries), you may not be able to recover all of a particular chain of emails.
Also, it is possible that they have backups, but none are valid (if they never did a restore to ensure the backup worked), or that they keep a very small window of backups (only 2 weeks’ worth, for example) for emergency restores, or even that they have deliberately erased them along with all the other original data they used.
Thanks for posting the exact email. I understand from other sources that this email was written in December 2008.
I had searched google and the email had not been posted before.
Now if anyone searches google with the phrase: “About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails”, they will find this very damning email is in 1228412429.txt
Thanks again.
Since Jones did a mass email delete in October 2008 there might be a good chance that the CRU has a backup of all the contents of their computers for the end of the third quarter 2008 or even a back up for the year end 2007.
Maybe another CRU whistleblower will sound off by giving the standard operating procedures used by the CRU for backing up their data.
Also, the fact that Phil Jones did a mass delete of emails in October 2008 could go a long ways in explaining why there were only slightly more than 1,000 emails covering a period of more than 10 years.
These are the worst sorts of fraudsters. If they are guilty of what I THINK they are, they should die penniless in prison, stripped of reputation, pensions and even self-respect.
Bump for my husband who thinks this is a “misunderstanding”.
As much a misunderstanding as Tiger Woods had about marital infidelity.
A "qualified yes but" on the backup question. Ideally backups are run every day. Assuming a five day work week, you start with four tapes labeled Monday through Thursday backing everything that has been flagged as modified on that date. On the Friday you do the same using a range of the last five days as the selection criteria, using a tape labeled first Friday. You recycle the Monday thru Thursday tapes the next week and end with a Second Friday tape. The last working day of the month you use a tape labeled with the name of the month and a selection range to include the total month. The next month you recycle all the weekly tapes as well as the daily tapes as before. The last working day of the year you do a yearly tape selecting all of that years dates. The following year you recycle all of the monthly tapes.
You will note that only things present when the backup is run appear on the tape, thus if something is deleted before the daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly tape is run, it will not be present on the backup tapes. Let's say the files were deleted in November and had been on the system long enough to have been backed up on the October tape. That tape will still be available until the end of October in the following year and file recovery is possible up until the day the Oct tape is recycled. If the files were deleted before the end of the month they were generated you have until that week number tape rolls around in the next month for recovery. The same applies if it didn't make the Friday tape except now your window of opportunity is a few days. If it was deleted before the nightly tape was run, you're screwed.
Backup systems are designed to preserve real valuable data, they do have a limited provision for things deleted in error but if the deletion is done intentionally and no attempt is made to recover, the files are gone with the first recycled tape.
There is another subtle problem. Hard drives are organized into addressable areas which then set the minimum file size. Suppose you type "Hi" into a word processor and save it in a file. The resultant file would contain the character codes for the "H" and "i" and be padded with nulls to the end of file marker which would be typically one l kilobyte (997 nulls). Because most emails tend to be fairly short a different scheme is needed to prevent this unnecessary waste of disk space. Your email client software creates folders for you in-box, trash and such. These folders are not the same as the folders created by the operating system. As a matter of fact the OS treats them as files in there own right. When your email software is receiving individual emails it appends them to the "in-box" folder which the OS then treats as a file. The email software creates it's own index into the file "in-box" and packs the individual pieces of mail nose to tail to compress out all of the unused waste space. In other words, the identity of individual pieces of mail is lost once the OS takes control of the file named "in-box". That's why you get those cryptic messages that "The Folder Is Being Processed, Please Wait". The only way to recover the individual pieces of mail from the file is to look through the email client software. For those old enough to remember, it is a "partitioned data base.
Regards,
GtG
PS The system described gives good coverage with a minimum of tapes generated. I suppose you could do a full system backup every night which would give you 99% coverage (anything deleted before the tape is run is gone!), but it would soon exhaust both your budget and your storage space not to mention the problem of knowing what is stored on which tape...
Did you ever think when looking at rack upon rack upon rack of 9-track 6250bpi tapes that “this is as good as it is going to get?”
I know I didn’t.
Somehow, I look back on the automated tape libraries of the 80’s mainframe operations and think “While it looked clunky at the time, at least they actually had a real backup system.”
Today, the problem is compounded by orders of magnitude by laptops and other floating devices...
Thanks for the info.
Copenhagen is certainly a major motive for the CRU data to be leaked when it was.
However, another motive could be what you describe here. Namely, the October 2008 back up data was going to be overwritten in October 2009.
Just a thought.
“””You will note that only things present when the backup is run appear on the tape, thus if something is deleted before the daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly tape is run, it will not be present on the backup tapes. Let’s say the files were deleted in November and had been on the system long enough to have been backed up on the October tape. That tape will still be available until the end of October in the following year and file recovery is possible up until the day the Oct tape is recycled.”””
Just require any institution that has received taxpayer money for “climate research” to pay it back or the administrators to face jail time.
Such a small thing to ask, am I right?
That said, if I were a proponent of AGW, rather than downplay or try to explain their actions away, I would be furious at the scientist/researchers/media/politicians who are part of this fraud. The damage to the environmental movement over this is going to be hard to recover from. Serious environmental issues are now likely to be dismissed or flat-out disbelieved.
How many “environmentalists” do you believe are more concerned about the “erf” and the environment
than they are concerned about promoting a global socialist agenda?
In other words, they won’t be really mad about this except for the fact that “they were THIS close”...
You make a good point. But I will use the comments in my post when I talk to my liberal friends about Climategate in an effort to get them to reveal their true motives.
I agree that this is a great opportunity to “pants” the fascists if they say that this doesn’t matter.
To wit:
Oh, so you want to go through with your economy killing policies ANYWAY even though there are serious doubts about your entire reason for doing it? You want to curtail individuals’ use of energy ANYWAY?
Could it be that GW really didn’t matter to you at all? That you just wanted to control individuals’ behavior and consumption just because you’re a fascist a$$hole?
Bump- I’m glad to see the proper terms beign used- let’s just hope someoen in OUR congress has the guts to use them as well- this IS a CRIMINAL Conspiracy (no wonder there was a ‘consensus’- they ALL want ot criminally depriove the little folks of their hard earned money)
Our congrssional leaders should make it absolutely clear to Obama that if he commits this country to ANY copenhagen deals, that prosecutions WILL take place because of htis criminal scam/fraud
Ask 'em if they think this is a good idea - that will tell you volimes, from Steyn's "Dog Ate My Tree Rings":
Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.