County being sued over public records

[Andy A]

Unfortunatly the $500 solution will not work. Using this just creates a simple backup of the e-mail system. This gives a one time snapshot of the system when the backup is run and is normally overwritten when the backup is run again or as changes are made. What this requires is the saving a permanent archiving of all e-mail sent to or from the county entity. This requires working from the mail server at the county. This system would need to never lose data never delete e-mail or files, never alow the removal of files or data, allow the searching and retrieval of files and be off site (not in Walton County). This would be a private sector solution one that would have to be bought and paid for by County Funds meaning tax dollars. The $500 external hard drive will not do this. More than likely for simple backups the county already has servers assigned for performing this task on a daily basis.

Thanks for the clarification. As I have said many times previously, being computer illiterate has its drawbacks. I don't know how I, and millions of others, survived about 50 years without them. I'm not knocking them, I just don't understand them and, to be honest, I'm too lazy to learn more than the basic use of them.

 

[Susan Horn]

There has to be an elegant and affordable way to do this, and if there's not, someone with $ to invest could do well to put a geek team on it already. I cannot believe it is really all this difficult. There must be algorhytms that can be written to back up new stuff without deleting the old. Jeepers.

 

[TechPyle]

I am sorry I did not mean to say that thier were no solutions to the public records email problem. Thier are many companies that have solutions for this. Thier is an article on the state using a symantic product. The problem is as always a matter of cost. I looked up some of these compaines online to see if any had cost figures and I only found one and it was over $4.00 per user per month or more depending on the amount of email that needed to be stored. The other companies have you call them and give information about your company so they can design a solution for you but thier price structure is not available online (at least not that I found with a quick search). So yes there are solutions that will work but the cost will be the issue. Robert suggested around $40,000 and that is probably about the best guestamate you can get without going throught the full process of sitting down with the vendors and working out details.

 

[Susan Horn]

If it really costs that much, makes sense to hire someone to customize and manage Walton County's own program. I'm guessing someone could do that on a part time basis, or consulting, whether they lived here or worked remotely from wherever.