in the time frame they are talking about a 500MB quota is a large quota on an Exchange 2003 server and was considered a best practice in Corporate Land. Now if you are expected to retain documents for a long time, you had to buy an add-on to Exchange to save the emails on another server. With the advent of Exchange 2010 and 2013 plus Office 365, that no longer applies. Also, if the heads crash on a hard drive, recovery is going to cost around $2K and you are going to have a hard time recovering complete files off of it.
My bad. I just read that their quota was 150mb. I agree with what they should have done to preserve their email. They didn’t. I also agree with the $2000 for offsite recovery. However I’ve gone that route and probably got back 90+% of our files.