re: Ok, walk me through IRS email situation...

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Tell you what, if she really did this intentionally, she's not only very smart but a psychic. Here are the emails from 3 years ago when this happened:

7/19/11 Lerner emails Carl Froehlich asking if he can recover lost files on her computer.

7/19/11 Froelich emails Lerner and says they'll ask Diane. "If she can't fix it, nobody can'"

7/20/11 Lerner responds "We can only try, but it may be too late... don't they send them off to hard drive cemetery?"

7/20/11 Email to Lerner.. haven't been able to recover the data. Still trying.

7/20/11 Lerner responds "thanks for the update. I'll keep my fingers crossed"

8/1/11 Email to Lerner: As a last resort, sent your hard drive to CI Forensics

8/5/11 Email to Lerner, the sectors on the hard drive were bad which made your data unrecoverable.

8/6/11 Lerner responds: Thanks for trying. Sometimes stuff happens.

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I'm assuming that the IRS operates like any other big corporation in today's world, at least with respect to how they operate their computer networks.

This type of stuff happens. The hard drive can go bad. However, corporate and government employees have two different ways of storing their data: the local storage, which is the computer's hard drive, and cloud storage, where the data is stored remotely on a secure server. E-mail that is sent to or from the employee is stored on the remote server, although it may also be stored on the employee's hard drive, as well (in case the employee wants to access it offline).

When her hard drive crashed, they probably tried to fix it and couldn't (or it wasn't cost effective). The end solution was that she needed a new hard drive (or new computer). Most likely, she was asking them to fix the hard drive because other items, like pictures and other personal information were on the hard drive and not stored on the network drives. As a general rule, with work computers, you put all your work stuff on the network, and the personal stuff stays on the hard drive. With e-mails, she wouldn't have had a choice, as that is stored on the network servers automatically, where it could be retrieved, if needed.