The odds are more like 234 billion to 1 that all 8 hard drives failed and not one had any recoverable data at all, but hey , as Lerner correctly observed, “stuff happens” so the explanation is “perfect”
This does not however, explain why the data was not recovered.
Lerner and the other 7 or 8 people involved were in VERY high level positions, the analog of a corporate President or VP in the private sector and mission critical data that a company has a legal duty to preserve is stored on those drives.
The hard drive is replaced and the data from the archived back ups is retrieved and the data is loaded on the new hard drive and restored onto the computer within a day or so of the failure .
In the case of the IRS the emails were doubly backed up.
First the email on the e mail server was backed up by the email back up system and archived.
Second, the emails were downloaded onto the computer and were archived by the incremental back up system that preserved the downloaded email data resident on the hard drive.
As soon as the hard drives went down, the drives would have been replaced and all of the data from the multiple back up systems by IRS IT people within a matter of days, if not hours to restore everything that had been on the hard drives at the time of failure.
If anything from email was missing, it would be reconstructed by the IT team from the totally separate e-mail traffic logs showing who and where incoming and outgoing e mails were directed.
To think that multiple Officer level employees of a multi billion dollar organization such as the IRS would have hard drive crashes and lose years of data without having it restored is simply insane - how could they have kept doing their jobs for the last several years without their emails or the data on their hard drives.
There is absolutely no evidence that there was any corresponding disruption of job duties of any of the officials in question due to such a massive and improbable data loss.
...here is absolutely no evidence that there was any corresponding disruption of job duties of any of the officials in question due to such a massive and improbable data loss.....
You have stated the problem expertly. I have worked in government for many years, and have had computers fail.
A call to the IT office would initiate a work order and a tech would show up, fix the computer or replace it and then as I watched, reload all my data including emails on the spot.
Only then would they sign off the work order as being fixed and close it out.
You do not lose much data when your hard drive fails, especially your emails.
The question has NEVER been asked if they have lost ANY taxpayers information. I’m sure they have backups and archives all the way back to the epoch.
They can pull that sh!t up in an instant if they want too.