Oh FFS...

[cybersattva]

Sysadmins of the world, please save my poor city...

Today's Globe Story

Particularly of note, the city IT office was unable to retrieve more than 18 of the aide's emails because he "double-deleted" them. Where "double-deleting" involves the nefarious steps of deleting an email, then emptying the trash. Whoops! All backups gone! All traces of

Comments

[2h2o]

I love that the story can't manage to distinguish "hard drive" from "computer." Of course, IT is probably the sort of thing only practiced in Salem.

[esqgirl]

Actually, it is all on an exchange server, but backups are done after midnight each night, not continuously, thus double-deleting same-day effectively makes it invisible on the server, though I would question whether or not the hard drive itself might not have some remnants. (At least, I have been told the problem in this case is that they have the same set up as the state's exchange server in this regard, and that was the hole in the state's system when I was managing electronic discovery preservation for a large-scale litigation -- We ended up doing real-time journaling/"sniffing" for the likely custodians, rather than simply asking them not to do this.)

[cybersattva]

Oh cool, someone who actually knows what's going on over there. It does sound like the usual data recovery tools have been pretty successful at recovering much of the deleted emails from the physical device (now devices). I'd suggest what a technical enforcement solution might be so that this sort of thing isn't necessary, but you already wrote it. Many ways to skin this cat. Asking folks to be nice and play by the rules probably not being the optimal one.

[esqgirl]

Yeah. My personal opinion is that full compliance with the state's public records law is near impossible and hopelessly expensive with the current tech infrastructure of the Commonwealth and its municipalities. I am not justifying intentional disregard or thwarting of the law, which seems to be more the kind of thing at issue here. But there is a longer rant available someday at the incredibly outdated nature of the law and the weird sorta-compliance this leads to, as well as bizarre, contortionist busy-work for the enforcement officials.