Remember the heady days back in 2000 when Bush asserted he would be the first MBA president, one who, if elected, would run his administration like a corporation? Well, if any CEO oversaw such a travesty as these eight years turned out to be, he'd be serving time in Leavenworth. I suppose there is still time for that to happen, but not much. One more example: willfully spitting in the face of future historians (and current regulators) by having email retention policies worse than mine! Way worse than mine.
Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings into the missing White House email messages. After watching the three hours of hearings and reviewing the various supporting transcripts, my first impression can be summarized in three words: what a mess!
Some good did come out of the hearings. There is a lot more technical information now available on what's going on, at least on the White House side of the missing email question. I'll be reviewing that information in-depth over the next week and reporting on it in detail.
[snip]
[Theresa Payton, Chief Information Officer, Office of Administration]. Mr. Tierney, if I might, we still have PST files that we have not been able to associate with a component. I am assuming that was the same case back in 2005, but I do not know that for sure. They contain l7 million emails.
Yes, boys and girls, the White House archives its email to PST files. In his interrogatory, McDevitt states:
If my recollection is correct, at that time there were over 5,000 PST files with an average size of approximately 2 Gigabytes.
So, here's the thing. Let me put on my OutlookPower editor's hat for a moment. Probably the number one question we get from OutlookPower readers is how to recover corrupted PST files. PST is the file format Outlook uses to store its email in, and is quite explicitly not an enterprise-level archiving technology. There's also a limit to the PST file format, in that all PST files created by Outlook prior to Outlook 2003 had a 2 gigabyte limit. In fact, Microsoft recommends never, ever letting your PST file get above 1.6 gigs, because of the likelihood of corruption and the difficulty in restoration.
If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, well, that ain't good in a very big way.
For the record, the 2 gigabyte limit (and the 1.6 gig practical limit) isn't a secret. Most IT managers running Outlook are very aware of this, and we, here at OutlookPower have written about it numerous times. So to use PST files as a Presidential Records Act archiving methodology is an undeniable worst-practice.
[Click to read more, including six suggestions The White House email controversy: hearings spotlight disturbing IT practices (EasyPrint)]
Get a rope. Bush was too busy tamping down the bong to bother with actual executive decisions.
(SNAFU)
