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really has nothing to do with data archival.
What I mean is that if someone "emptied the trash" (not only deleted email, but also hunted in the email servers for duplicates or "trashcan" type services and deleted that as well), the DR system would ensure that the updated databases (with the deletions) are duplicated across all DR member systems. This is the behavior you want from a DR system.
What the courts or congress are looking for is archived data, that is, data that once resided on the active system but was removed by someone. For that you need to troll through the system backups.
That the Whitehouse might still use a robotic tape system or even a manual tape system for creating archival data sets would not surprise me in the least.
That such a backup system would use tape cycles or tape rings for selecting the next tape to use for backup would be the old (only 10 year old) industry standard. This ensures that tapes are reused and, simultaneously, the number of rewrite cycles on each tape is kept to a minimum (by using a round robin selection).
But what WOULD surprise me is that they would not have kept a once a month or once every 4 month full backup tape as a permanent archive of the data that was present at the time the tape was created. That, too, would have been an industry standard practice. Otherwise, when somebody noticed that they "fumble fingered" and deleted an important file say 2 months ago, the backup system would NOT have it (as all tapes would be overwritten). As a person who was responsible for about 3 PB of government data it was stressed upon me that, above all else, losing someone's data was unacceptable, even if the user went to some trouble to delete the data that they now want to access.
Tapes don't cost so much that they could not have afforded the drain of 12 tapes a year.
Of course, whenever in the text I have used the term "tape", what I mean is a tape set, i.e. enough physical media to contain the entire contents of one complete copy of the file system or database, for relatively small email servers, covering the email of something like 300 or 400 or even 1000 users (I have no idea how many people use the "whitehouse.gov" email domain name now) a complete backup is likely to be less than a Terabyte in size, therefore a tape set is 10 to 20 tapes or so, using 10 year old tape recording technology. A Terabyte would give 1000 email users 1 GB of "current" undeleted email, including attachments.
Also, in this day and age, it would surprise me that the National Archives, interested in all things Presidential, would not have requested a complete copy of all emails to/from senior whitehouse officials and aides, to form a "witness to history" record. Not to mention the President himself, for his eventual Presidential library. Unless the people involved knew that they were doing or writing about crimes and wanted this never to be found.
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