Have you been following that e-Mail fiasco at the White House?

 The White House has estimated that they have lost 225 emails over a period of 20 months since 2003. And now they’re asking for help from contractors to come in and find their lost email. There are all sorts of ramifications about this such as how do you ensure that the contractors are not going to walk away with any lost emails that they recover? Or how do you ensure that any recovered emails are not corrupted? I mean, how would you prevent the recovery team of contractors from walking out with shiny emails that would have all kinds of buyers available?

It is also telling that the White House is asking for help from outside its own IT operations. Clearly the White House must think that if you’re capable of losing that many emails then it’s most likely you’re not capable of recovering those emails. I assume they’ve already gone searching through the archives for those lost emails. Guess how many archive tapes there are? 35,000 disaster recovery tapes!

If they’re using 600GB compressed tape drives then that’s 35K tapes multiplied by 600GB equal to 21,000,000GB or 21PB! 21 Petabytes of emails! And if they were using  300GB uncompressed per tape drive then you’re looking at 35000 times 300GB equals 10,500,000GB or 10.5PB of emails.

An earlier analysis from 2005 estimated the number of days of missing e-mails at 473 over a period of 20 months. Doing the math on TB of email per day and that’s a nominal figure of 44.4TB per day of backup (21,000TB divided by 473 days equals 44.39TB per day). I’m curious to know how many – and which – White House departments are involved. I can’t imagine that the entire White House is only backing up 44.4TB per day???

And, what about the data at their Disaster Recovery site? I assume they have one. Have they not been able to restore and review that data at their DR site? The advantage of a DR site and regular backups is freedom from fear of data loss. Another consideration not mentioned in these news stories is having a regular test plan and regularly testing that plan.

I can imagine that the White House is having a hard time explaining amongst themselves how 225 days of email dating back to 2003 became missing. It’s kind of like “Indiana Jones meets the Temple of E-Doom”.