Horseshit: White House reveals e-mail backups missing

Okay Exchange and Notes admins, do you want to know HOW our government lost their own emails?

By laughing in the face of basic best practices.

During the Clinton Administration, a lot of thought was put into constructing a solid mail system, with Lotus Notes, where everything is tracked, backed up, and archived appropriately.

Fast-forward into the current Bush Administration. Notes was starting to look a bit dated. If you are familiar with the system, it looks a bit like CompuServe, circa 1992. The desire for change was there, and they got it. But boy was it poorly executed.

The Bush Administration made a move to Microsoft Exchange. Yes, the same system you probably use for your small business. While backups and recovery are a snap, the system is rather self-healing (when you back it up regularly and do the correct things with the transaction logs)...

So to make a long story shorter, the admins didn't put an effective archiving solution in place. There was a system, but it didn't go into production.

Without a good solution in place, what do people do? Create PST files of course, and that's where things of course get messy.

I'm disgusted by the amount of negligence that had to take place for this to happen. Their entire IT team needs to be tarred and feathered, like any IT department who has failed a simple SOX audit.

Come on guys, publically traded companies get shut down completely for lesser offenses. Of course, the cynic in myself tells me this was all intentional.

I'm positive the NSA could rebuild every single message sent to and from their systems, with the big email wiretap system they're using these days...

White House reveals e-mail backups missing - The Bush administration has disclosed that back-up tapes of e-mail messages with dates that coincide with the invasion of Iraq have not been preserved.

[Mark's Tech Feed]