A lawsuit seeking information on millions of missing White House e-mails has lead to a settlement [PDF file] that will require a disclosure of current e-mail archiving and backup practices.

“The e-mail problem began in 2002 and 2003 after the White House moved from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange,” writes Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau. “As it moved to the new platform, the President’s IT staff also discontinued the use of [a] legacy, circa 1994, electronic management and archiving system, called Automated Records Management Systems (ARMS). Development began on a new archiving system that ran into its own issues and wasn’t implemented.”

“Without an automated archiving system, the White House relied on manual processes to archive e-mails, and that’s where the problems evidently began,” Thibodeau writes.

Click here to read the Computerworld story.