Judge Could Order Questioning of Hillary Clinton’s Backup E-mail Archives

HOLMDEL, N.J. /PRNewswire/ — Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court for the D.C. Circuit is expected to hear arguments to order the State Department to question Hillary Clinton on the existence of emails on backup tape archives, The Hill Reported, but information management company Index Engines can explain exactly what this means and how it is done.

When Clinton implemented an email server to control and manage her correspondence, her team hired Platte River Networks to host this environment. This is a third-party organization that likely has procedures in place to protect data and ensure it can be restored in the case of a disaster such as a flood or fire by copying all email ever created onto backup tapes.

This standard “IT” process produces a snapshot of what actually happened and it is secure and tamper proof, and represents a factual record of the past and are much more reliable than the records stored on local servers and hard drives that can be accessed by many and easily spoiled.

In this case, the backup of the email server most likely occurred at an offsite location chosen by the hosting provider, Platte River Networks, and the data was placed on tapes that are typically preserved in offsite storage vaults. When the main server was shut down, the tapes could have been forgotten about.

Index Engines has software that can quickly scan backup tapes, index the contents of the email, and make it searchable and accessible without the use of any other third party software or infrastructure. Through this process keywords, time frames and file types can be quickly produced and extracted without corruption.

“Data never dies,” said Tim Williams, CEO of Index Engines. “All modern organizations have robust data protection processes that make copies of everything and archive it on backup media to ensure it can survive a disaster. In cases like this, those copies represent the factual truth. They can’t be changed after the fact.

“When an email is sent, it is copied and archived and preserved many times over. This is a disaster recovery feature standard in any data center. What Hillary Clinton probably didn’t know is that exact copies of what existed is archived in data center disaster recovery archives, or backup tapes, that allow for a rebuilding of an email server in case of a failure.”

EDITORS NOTE: To learn more about securing your organization’s legacy tape data, contact info@indexengines.com or visit www.indexengines.com.

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