Bush Administration's E-Mail Deluge May Overload Archive System

Lucas123 writes "The Clinton administration generated 32 million e-mails. Bush's administration has generated 50 times as much data — 140TB, 20TB of which is email — which soon will have to be archived through a new government-built records management system. The new system may not be up to the task because the technology behind it may not be able to handle the sheer volume of data along with the fact that the Bush administration has been slow in providing the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with needed information about the records, according to a Computerworld story. Questions have also been raised about millions of missing e-mails from between March 2003 and October 2006. 'It wasn't until this summer that an intensive effort began to share information,' said Ken Thibodeau, director of NARA's Electronic Records Archives."

Comments

Re:Text only, no html

[Neoprofin]

If it anything like our corporate mail server I would bet you the number one space filler is people making minor changes on documents then reattaching them and forwarding them back to the same 50 people who just got the previous version of the document, repeated over 100 iterations as the email soon becomes a 2GB mess.

If they hadn't gone to exchange....

[CFD339]

The Bush administration moved the White House from a Notes/Domino based system to a Microsoft Exchange based system.

Before moving, they'd had no downtime -- even when congress was taken out for 2 days by the code red word (they were on Exchange).

In moving, they mysteriously 'lost' all their backups for a period of time that was suspicious as hell, and now they can't scale to handle the capacity issues they face.

In a Notes/Domino world, this kind of archiving problem wouldn't be all that hard to deal with. You'd just need enough storage for it, and create archives per week/month/year (or an archive per individual's mailbox, or whatever) to put on as much hardware as was required. I single checkbox would be all that was needed to have it encrypted as well.

Oh well. I guess if conveniently "loosing" mail when you don't want it found is one of your design goals, than you probably want to migrate to something less reliable.