Information request relating to digital storage of information once it is deleted from individual inboxes
Thank you for your email of 18 April in which you requested the following information:
- Please provide all information held concerning the storage of information in digital form once deleted from individual mailboxes.
- Please provide full details of how information in digital form deleted from individual mailboxes can be retrieved.
- Please provide all information available to PHSO staff concerning the deletion of information from their mailboxes.
- How many times in the past three years has information deleted from an individual mailbox been i. requested, and ii. retrieved.
Please see below for answers to your questions.
1. If an email is less than two weeks old and is deleted it can be recovered using the "Recover Deleted Items" option in Outlook. If the email is over two weeks old, it is irrecoverable. All emails in a user's mailbox are deleted 90 days after receipt and are irrecoverable except for a full system restore from a backup. We would never revert to a backup to recover email unless there was a complete server outage as restoring the server would lose all information after the date of the backup we were restoring to. For example, if we restored the data to 14 May 2015 backup we would lose all emails received between 14 May and the day of the full system restore.
2. As above, if it is within two weeks of receipt information can be recovered using the "Recover Deleted Items" option in Outlook. If it is older than two weeks, we cannot recover individual emails. We do backup our email system but this can only recover the entire server. As stated above, we would never revert to a backup to recover email unless there was a complete server outage as restoring the server would lose all information after the date of the backup we are restoring to.
3. Please click on the link for our Email Management and Data Storage Policy.
4. We have never retrieved anything over two weeks old. We hold no information on how many times in the past three years deleted information has been requested and retrieved.
I hope you find this information useful.
FOI/DP Officer
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman