Four years of B.C. cabinet e-mails erased -- Anyone else floored by this?

Four years of B.C. cabinet e-mails erased -- Anyone else floored by this?

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As an IT professional, I find the BC government's negligence offensive. It's simple: if there's crucial data, back it up. It's not hard. They're e-mails, for crying out loud--not 1080p HD videos. That they only back up 13 months of e-mails when 7 years' worth is "crucial" (i.e., required by law) is mind-blowing stupidity.

Seven years worth isn't crucial, it is just what some government type dictated. When I was in business I regularly threw out anything I didn't need. Drove Revenue Canada nuts a few times. I simply told them if they wanted seven years worth of old paper they could store it. Once a project was completed anything I didn't think was relevant to bidding went in the furnace. In any event some of the documents they are looking for are more than seven years old now and should be disposed of. And why would anyone keep copies of old Emails? You answer them and hit delete.

I agree, but...

Well, considering it's law, I would expect the government to have a system set up where all e-mails sent or received would be saved and backed up "behind the scenes", so to speak; meaning, if employees want to keeps a tidy inbox and delete old irrelevant stuff, that's fine, but the "deleted" e-mails should never be totally deleted--just stored where individual employees don't see them. This is easy to do.

I understood that all gov't emails are subject to the Access to Information Act, so they have to be kept by law.

I'd like to delete a noticeable portion of gov't.

"Oops..there goes the evidence. Sorry people. Ole butterfingers did it again. Shrug"

Probably not a big deal, any half wit would know that anything of a major concern wouldn't be put in an email anyway and if it was would be backed up separately.

Well, as a retired IT professional, I can say with authority that that's simply not correct. Every place I ever worked after email came along tried to use the email system as a document management system. I kept insisting that it cannot be relied on for that, document management is a separate function and if you want to do it electronically you need purpose-built software to do it safely and securely, and you need to train people to think about what they put into email and consider whether it should be preserved or not. I got exactly nowhere. A lot of email communication is trivial and doesn't need to be saved permanently, but a lot of material that now travels by email used to go in the form of typed memos and letters and there was always a copy filed in some central file registry. That doesn't happen anymore, people send stuff around and don't think about it at all, assuming the machines and the IT people who run them will take care of everything. They can't, and I saw the consequences of that repeatedly: people couldn't find information they needed because it was in the email system, not a proper document database or a central paper file system. Most organizations these days do not know what they know anymore, too much of it's in the wrong place and not properly organized or indexed.

Besides, "any half wit..." Remember we're talking about a government bureaucracy here.

"Besides, "any half wit..." Remember we're talking about a government bureaucracy here. "- God damn it I keep forgetting it that, I guess I was thinking of normal folks.