On January 27th, the IPC/Ontario held that records stored only on a legacy backup system were not “records” accessible under Ontario’s public sector access statute.
The requester asked for all records that showed access by a named employee to their own and their spouse’s service department records at a municipality.
The institution provided a fee estimate of $130 for data going back 28 months. For older data, the institution needed to restore data from tapes from a backup system that it had discontinued. It produced estimates (of $19,000 and $13,000) that included work to purchase a new tape drive and software, but on appeal argued the backup records were not accessible because they were not capable of being produced “by means of computer hardware and software or any other information storage equipment and technical expertise normally used by the institution.” The IPC agreed.
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