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

Number of emails generated.

[Ice Wewe]

"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.

Well, to be fair, email wasn't quite as popular during Clinton's administration as it is now. Then again, the 400GB of e-mails that the Clinton administration must have generated (if it is 50 times less than 20TB) must have been rather hard to store when he left office.

Text only, no html

[Teun]

Start by mandating text only mail.

No more fancy signatures and html crap will cause a 60-80% drop in volume if not more.
Mandate the Usenet way with replies after the original, (it will) teach people to cut irrelevant repeats.
Stop the addition of stupid and ineffective disclaimers.

Teach the use of (ftp) servers for sharing large documents, no more Microsoft sized attachments, send a link.

Re:Text only, no html

[malkavian]

Longer email threads seem to end up forwarded and brought to the attention of many people you never expected at the outset.
Judicious editing of the emails to include only the relevant sections for the replies, giving the context of the emerging thread of conversation means that someone being brought up to speed with that segment of the conversation doesn't need to trawl through masses of irrelevant junk to get at the meat of the issue.
I tend to do it as an efficiency gain, rather than taking storage space into account. All comes back to that quote you hear people come out with after sitting through a bad movie "Well, that's an hour of my life I'll never get back". It may only be a few minutes at a time, but they mount up over time. Plus, crafting things to cut to the heart of the matter puts things into sharp perspective, and means people are far less likely to digress, saving even more wasted time.

Re:Shadowy Government

[rtfa-troll]

No; you are partisan when you think an accusation against one side can be answered by an accusation against the other side. They are both bad (they are US politicians; corruption is so endemic that it's legal and called lobbying), but Clinton's presidency ended about eight years ago and isn't something worth discussing now.

The questions are; how to make sure Bush follows the law for what he still does? How to make sure Obama doesn't start off like Bush?