On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 10:34:31 EDT, Patrick W Gilmore said:
Bringing this back on topic, IFF that can be extended to e-mail (and my understanding is that it can), the disclaimer is worthless - at least the part about having to delete it.
I often send the miscreants a pointer to Peter Guttmann's work on securely erasing magnetic media, and ask if they're willing to pay for the downtime of tracking down which blocks on the multiple terabytes of RAID-5 on our main mail hub need to be wiped out (remember - the block could have been allocated and then freed, so it gets interesting). Oh.. and would they care to pay for new backup tapes, because we'll have to restore them to a scratch area, erase the offending files, then make new tapes and destroy the old ones and wipe the temp disks.. Oh.. and second-order costs for people idled while we do the work... ;) I mean, if they're so worried that their screw-up will earn them an Ollie North: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/reagan/chron.txt they should pay for the clean-up, right? :) (And yes - I am *fully* aware that we don't take a second of downtime if we lose a disk on a hot-swap RAID-5, as it auto-hot-swaps and rebuilds onto a spare and then asks for help.. recovering from one failing drive in a raidset is *not* symmetric with intentionally trying to nuke possibly-moving data off all the volumes concerned.. ;)