Slashdot Mirror


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."

7 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. It is Clinton's porn stash! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The other 120 TB was probably just Clinton's porn stash that the Bush administration found while purging off records.

  2. Number of emails generated. by Ice+Wewe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  3. Text only, no html by Teun · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    1. Re:Text only, no html by Neoprofin · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Text only, no html by malkavian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  4. If they hadn't gone to exchange.... by CFD339 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
  5. Re:Shadowy Government by rtfa-troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    --
    =~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();