Rather convenient? I would love to see how they manage their IT resources.
If organizations are really bad at storing data, but it only gets tested with important queries, incompetence is going to look a lot like malice (I make no case for which this particular incident is).
Of course, I've painted somewhat of a false dichotomy. If you are required by policy to retain email, doing so is unlikely to give you any benefit and may well cause severe political problems.
The most logical thing to do is severely understaff and underbudget the sysadmins responsible. Then, when the backups are needed, there's a significant chance they'll be nowhere to be found, and you've saved money in the process too.
That would be malicious incompetence, so to speak.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, unless that stupidity is adequately explained by malice.
I'd like to coin this extension Hanlon's Exception.
That is to say, if you "fuck up" bad enough, why should society give a shit that you did not have malicious intent? Much like drunk driving, I think that this is a fine case for strict liability.
This discussion hearkens back to the current investigation into John Swallow, the former Attorney General of Utah who resigned less than a year into his term and is currently the subject of multiple investigations.
Swallow 'lost' over 1,700 emails from his time in office on his home computer. The state of Utah has spent over $100,000 to recover them (some successfully), see: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57648883-78/swallow-sltrib...
I had to give them money once and they literally have different people to record a payment and another to look up your balance.
But they do give you the phone number that will get you to that other employee. You just go through the phone tree and you eventually get the person who can look up your balance.
Its the dumbest way to do things I've ever seen for an organization in the US.
For those downvoting, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622
Maybe it's the time I've spent in corporate environments, but losing data due to shitty IT management seems very plausible to me.
If you told the IRS you couldn't file your reports because you'd lost user data they'd consider it criminal negligence, I imagine, that you'd not secured the data through backup. Sauce for the goose ...
Data loss where there's no backup system even in place sounds like reason to fire all the IT managers in systems like the IRS where the preservation/security of data is vital to proper function.