Or it could be a part of a well-scheduled maintenance schedule that was agreed by IT and the system owners. I used to have a system like that under my purview,

Or it could be a part of a well-scheduled maintenance schedule that was agreed by IT and the system owners. I used to have a system like that under my purview, a voice recording system. Unless we were under court order or internal compliance instruction, all back up tapes were to be erased after 1 month of the conversation being recorded. This was a daily job for the VR system admins -- pull tapes from 1 month prior, erase, and recycle back into the recording system to be used again. No special instruction needed to do a BAU task. If a court order was received a tape was pulled out of the general pool, and sent off to compliance for safeguarding. So if we received a court order, that order would go to CEO / COO, to head of legal &/or compliance, who would then instruct head of IT, who would instruct the VR system admin to pull a tape. If somebody dropped the ball in that chain on day 29 and the order didn't reach the VR system guy, the tape was erased the next day. The importance of this monthly VR tape deletion process was important enough to have some extremely senior compliance person flying out to assure themselves it was actually happening, and happening according to this procedure. Why 30 days only you ask? Because we were only obligated under law to maintain 30 days worth of recordings. Anything longer than that became a regulatory risk to us. Under my VR system erasure policy, the guy in question who wiped the election system might not have anybody to point to as ordering him/her to wipe.