From Paul Sullivan:
Mark,
According to IT experts I know, there are back-ups of the White House e-mails. Furthermore, the NSA would have all copies since they were sent from a U.S. government building using U.S. government computers. It is a lie to say the e-mails are lost because a few hard drives were destroyed.
Best, Paul.
http://atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3622/81/White House Official Tells Judge Searching for Missing Emails Requires Too Much Work by Jason Leopold
The White House's chief information officer said the Bush administration should not be compelled to search for millions of emails on individual computers and hard drives that may have been lost between 2003 and 2005 because it would be too expensive and require hundreds of hours of work, according to a filing the White House made with a federal court late Friday.
Friday's court filing by the White House came in response to an order issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola last week demanding that the White House show cause why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a "forensic copy" of emails from individual hard drives. Facciola entered the order in part because the White House admitted that it did not preserve back-up tapes prior to October 2003.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and George Washington University's National Security Archive sued the Bush administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving emails sent and received between 2003 and 2005.
In documents filed with Faciolla Friday, Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, said the White House routinely destroyed its hard drives every three years "in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance. So its unlikely that any lost emails would be retrieved anyway.