It was 20 individual PC disks that crashed. From the Daily caller article:
I havent talked to anybody about this. I havent asked anybody about it, Koskinen said, referring to email backup tapes that might still exist, but which the IRS did not check after the computers of Lois Lerner and up to 20 other IRS employees central to the investigation allegedly crashed.
And we’ve discussed this on numerous occasions: enterprise-class email solutions DO NOT store emails locally. Any organization using or allowing POP mail with their enterprise is just asking for trouble.
Microsoft Exchange is either “in the cloud” with Office 365 or configured locally in very complex setups involving redundant mail pools, journaling, monitored MTAs, and highly redundant storage backends on at least a NAS system if not a full-blown SAN.
Even email solutions such as Gmail use IMAP which leave the mail on a server. You can’t ever “delete” an email. It ALWAYS exists somewhere.
This is straight up obstruction of justice playing on the complete ignorance of lawmakers on how IT actually works.