Six years ago, my boss was backing up his HD at the office (AF unit) and we had a power flux....next thing we know....the back-up stops, and his entire PST was screwed up. Five years of messages gone. The back-up? We went to it and for some reason, the drive was corrupted.
Last year as I was leaving my gov’t job....I was in the midst of backing up my PST, which was way over the recommended size of ‘safety’. In essence, my backup went wrong, and I had to resort to a back-up from six months prior. The PST business is not a stable platform, in my opinion.
Five years of email gone?
You went to THE backup??
You made a single backup in 5 years -- and re-writing over and over and over on the same backup file?
You know, it's a good practice to make frequent backups and have each one uniquely and sequentially identified so that if you lose one, you can go to another backup. You might (possibly) lose some information -- but losing 5 years of email because a single file had a problem? Ever consider RAID for reliability?
Where government agents really and seriously want to recover so-called “corrupted” data, it is a no-brainer.