Are nightly backups taken in order to retain deleted e-mail messages?
The nightly e-mail backups are not specifically intended to capture deleted e-mail messages. Rather, the backups are primarily used to protect against a catastrophic failure of either the e-mail equipment or the e-mail management software (Microsoft Exchange). The backups are taken to ensure that e-mail messages would not be lost if such a failure occurred. In most cases, but not always, deleted e-mails can be retrieved by recovering them from the nightly backups within ten days. The nightly backups make a copy of all e-mail messages residing in the enterprise e-mail database at the instant the backups are executed. This includes any messages that still reside in a user’s “deleted items” folder at the instant the backup copy is made. If a user has “emptied” or purged their “deleted items” folder, the deleted e-mail messages will be gone and will not be copied during that evening’s nightly backup process. Thus, if a user receives an e-mail message today, deletes the e-mail message, and
