Today’s Washington Post contains an article about missing White House email backup tapes under the headline “White House Study Found 473 Days of E-Mail Gone.” The article cites White House chief information officer Theresa Payton who stated that “e-mail backup tapes were routinely "recycled" during the first three years of the Bush administration.”
Current discussions in the press about the missing White House email backup tapes operate under the mistaken assumption that enterprise data backup strategies are like home video taping. The White House claims that the backup tapes of emails were inadvertently reused, the way someone at home may inadvertently use a wedding tape to record the Super Bowl. That’s not the way it works.
I have worked in some capacity in information technology for the last 30 years. From the perspective of generally accepted IT practices, Payton’s explanation about the absence of backups for key time periods and especially for a large block of time from between 2003 and 2005 makes no sense at all.
Any professional information technology operation will follow a backup scheme that is some variation of the following:
• You backup your email servers every day, using different tapes for each day. Some organizations back up more than once a day if the volume is large enough or the material important enough.
• At the end of the week you take a master backup of everything and send it off site for permanent storage
• At that point you begin reusing your backup tapes for the new week.
Sometimes weekly backups are kept onsite with monthly backups sent to permanent storage. While it may be possible under these types of schemes to lose some data (though highly unlikely) it is almost impossible to lose a whole year’s worth of data unless the backup procedure has been compromised, or specific orders are given to delete certain information
Article comments
1 - Chris Bancells
Nixon had actual tapes. Bush has e-mail tapes. My how times have changed.
2 - bliffle
The author is correct. Tapes are not customarily reused because they deteriorate, so they are sent offsite for very longtrem storage in a bomb-proof, storm-proof, etc., facility, such as an old unused railroad tunnel through a mountain. This is true even for small businesses.
The administration spokesperson is telling a lie.
3 - Dr Dreadful
Have I wandered too far into the future? Do servers still actually use magnetic tapes to store data? Or is tape just a colloquialism in the industry? I'm interested to know.
4 - STM
You folks should never have got rid of the Queen. (You just can't trust those presidents ...)
It's not too late though - she had the Guards play the Star Spangled Banner during the changing of the guard at Buck House after 9/11, so I'm sure she'd be amenable to the return of the prodigal son.
I reckon it'd be a simple matter of sending an email.
5 - Charlie
Random note (as someone who's run backup systems at various points in my career)...
When backing up email that, for whatever reason, is of an archival nature, you don't just snapshot the data at various points. You would back up transaction logs in such a way that you could restore anything to a particular point in time. Any system that allows you to delete everything before the backup runs to avoid it hitting tape is flawed.
If Bush sent a message to Cheney at 11:32 and Cheney deleted it at 11:33, that message should still be available for discovery. Anything less doesn't meet up with industry best practices.