<p>The agency which provides IT services to the Victorian government has been let off the hook from an FOI request from the Age newspaper, with the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) deciding the expensive and time-consuming job of restoring email and calendars from backup tapes was too onerous.</p><p>The Age was pursuing CenITex over its performance in 2011 when it blew its budget by $A20 million and an email blackout left thousands of public servants without email for up to a week</p><p>It requested all "Emails, letters, memos or summaries of complaints "relating to its services, from January 1, 2010 to October 2011. It also asked for copies of the electronic diaries of two senior staff. CenITex successfully argued that all its staff received complaints and therefore to comply the request it would have to restore all emails to and from over 1000 staff, over 1.5 million individual emails,</p><p>These live on monthly backup tapes at an offsite facility, and CenITex also claimed that it would not have sufficient hardware to restore these emails onto the Lotus Domino server in its data centre.</p><p><a href="http://idm.net.au/article/009281-victorian-tribunal-ok-s-cenitex-foi-refusal">Keep reading...</a></p>