Yes, its complicated. In fact, the UK Information Commissioner appears to take the same view as the Scottish Information Commissioner about backups. But on both occasions when the IC's view have been tested before the Tribunal, the Tribunal has overturned the IC's rulings. The Tribunal is part of the DPA enforcement system, in Scotland as elsewhere in the UK (and SIC is not) so to the extent that one is trying to anticipate the position in relation to an SAR, the Tribunal's views have particular relevance.
Maurice Frankel
On 25 Jan 2012, at 15:08, George Ross wrote:
>> Not sure about SARs, but in relation to FOI requests, at least under the
>> UK Act, the Tribunal has held that information on backup tapes is held
>> for FOIA purposes.
>
> OTOH, the Scottish Information Commissioner's FAQ pages state: "Where a
> public authority has deleted an e-mail or an electronic file and it can only
> be retrieved by an IT specialist, the Commissioner takes the view that the
> information is no longer held by the public authority." So it would depend
> how your backups were structured, and what the normal access mechanism
> would be.
>
> --
> George D M Ross MSc PhD CEng MBCS CITP, University of Edinburgh,
> School of Informatics, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9AB
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