UK ISP PlusNet Accidentally Deletes 700GB of Email - This Post - External Link

UK ISP PlusNet Accidentally Deletes 700GB of Email. This is what they said in their official email:

This is a final update on the attempts to recover data following the major email platform issue on the 9th July 2006. For reference previous reports can be found at:
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1152433794.htm
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1153851234.htm

On the 9th July around 700GB of email was deleted. We have carried out further investigations in to the type of data that was contained in the emails. This investigation indicated that approximately 50% of these emails were identified as spam email, approximately 48% was email that had already been read, downloaded and a copy left on our servers with the remaining 1-2% of the email deleted being unread.

We have been working closely with the data recovery specialists who have been trying to recover the data on our behalf.

Due to the complexity of the task we have been unable to provide a reliable update on when recovery of data could be expected.

Our data recovery specialists have been able to provide a partial file list of the email data, but it has since become clear that we will not be able to recover the directory structure. Without the directory structure we cannot recover any meaningful data, due to complexity of associating the data with the relevant customer accounts.

I would like to take this opportunity to once again extend our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience caused by the loss of any customer emails and in particular the unread emails. This has been taken very seriously within PlusNet. An extensive analysis of how this happened has been carried out and working practices implemented to prevent it happening again.

A detailed technical account of the incident from our Network Services department can be read here:
http://usergroup.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,2753.0.html

Kind regards,

Alistair Wyse
Technical Director.