“...straw man.”
Obvious to you, Coloradan, and to me as well. The IRS uses Microsoft Outlook servers. It would take some explaining to claim they didn’t use the typical raid arrays. In fact I recall some years back the Network Appliance had what was one of probably many contracts to supply network storage arrays to the IRS. I assure you that you could, and I did, reach into a cabinet and, after loosening a screw, pull a disk out of a cabinet being used by some remote clients, and the clients would never know.
However they configured backups, Microsoft would be warning operators every time they booted the server(s) that backup was not in use, or configured, or there was no connection, and all those messages are logged, on multiple systems. Operators would have to explain to managers, who would receive mail messages with warnings, what they had done to respond to the warning, and what had cause the failure. Those servers have utilities designed into them to assure no loss of data, even if a server farm is caught in a Tsunami, it will almost always have at least on remote backup.
Since the disk failure is claimed to have been for selected users, which is next to impossible, the Outlook server was still operating, and there would have been hundreds or thousands of clients affected. If the storage system was local, which is highly unlikely, all sorts of error messages explain the sequence of errors leading up to complete failure. People with standard desktop or laptop systems don’t take the measures to monitor their rotating disks that server vendors do, for good reasons. Most disk drives that fail, surprising me, from the electronics in the drive. The rotating disks are amazingly robust, with 100,000 to a million hours mbtp (mean time between failures), more than most people will ever care about. Thus a drive failure, electronics, can, for a price, be addressed by removing the platters in a clean room and reading the data with working electronics. But that is probably just whatever talking points the White House has decided to feed the press to cover up its crimes.
Remember, computers have non-rotating physical memory, usually DRAM, and all transactions (Outlook uses a database for storing messages) are logged. Since the system was still operating, again, because no one else has been claimed to have been affected, every transaction is logged, and the pending transactions would most all be in physical memory. Since other disks were operating, those transactions still exist in DRAM, and, in case of a crash, there are milliseconds during which physical memory (DRAM) is written to rotating memory. That is what happens when there is a crash, a “machine check”. The power supplies have enough energy in their magnetic fields to allow DRAM to be written to a dump file.
Our government is being controlled by liars who know government employees are afraid, not only of losing the support upon which their families depend, but of prosecution. They depend upon the ignorance, not stupidity, because we all have different expertise. The media are a wall of protection. If anyone of either party, they are both complicit, were to subpoena a Microsoft Outlook or database expert they would get a truth they are obviously afraid to hear, since he or she would expose the perfidy of both parties. But that will never happen.
This weekend to hear the nonsense about the new fears of MANPAD attacks, as apparently used on the Malaysian airliner when our government refused to interview the hundreds of eyewitnesses on Long Island who saw the SAM ascend to Flight 800. Clinton’s FAA chief concocted, with the involvement of the FBI and CIA, a complete fiction, which to this day has never resulted in changes in the Boeing fuel tanks.
We have many who still talk about our Constitution, but we are currently “ruled” by people who count on your ignorance. Boeing was not asked to testify by the Bill Clinton administration as they created a fog of misdirection around the Flight 800 downing. Clinton had an election to win in a few months, and couldn’t be seen to be in the position Reagan found himself in after the Muslim Brotherhood killed over 200 of our solders in Lebanon. Obama will not let any investigation proceed which could hinder his plans for the last two years of his reign. He has more than the goods on most Republicans, but that is another story much explored here at Free Republic.
We absolutely know that Windows Outlook servers have never lost data without extensive records, and the failure of a single disk in a raid array, with lots qualifiers, could not lose just the data associated with a single account, and would still have archived a record of all the transactions, though perhaps not the messages, unless there was a remote archive. It would be hard to find, outside of some three letter agencies, any database in the US government that does not have a remote physical archive (backup). The loss of a singe disk in most raid arrays means that, while it may take a few hours, a fresh disk can be inserted and the missing data can be entirely reconstructed.
The reason three letter agencies may or may not use remote archives is simply the need to protect these archives. They are probably deep in the basements of the buildings housing the primary servers, but those agencies, if they weren’t all reporting to the man whose father was an alien, and whose father did “owe allegiance to a foreign sovereignty”, England, to which he, Barry, was born a natural born subject, could reconstruct those presumably lost records, all of which probably live today in NSA archives. Mail is transmitted via TCP/IP. I might not be current, but most or all Class V switches and those used in Wireless networking infrastructure, have ports, by laws existing for over twenty years, providing the government access to all the packets. That is an enormous amount of data, and too much to store for very long, but they have likely saved connection records.
Can the media be trusted to report anything that might arouse the ire of our naturalized executive? Lois Lerner is obviously a crook, but so are all those representatives who know of felonies that they dare not report. Eric Holder is part of the palace guard, as is our Wahhabi CIA chief, Brennan, Hagel, John Podesta, Jarrett, and many of the rest. Only the house presumably has control of the purse strings, but they don’t use it. We will have a large price to pay if we survive as some kind of republic, and it will sadly almost certainly involve more that the additional ten trillion dollars we owe our debtors, who, more and more, are our own domestic bondholders.