This isn't totally accurate. He could have deleted them before they were backed up on the email server as part of his mailstore, plus, again depending on their backup schedule, if the retention period of the Exchange DAG was expired, they wouldn't be recoverable.Tressel couldn't have erased them. He could have tried, but they stayed on the server, which is where the grad student accessed them. Now, Smith and Gee could have buried it, paid off the grad student and went full Ono on the NCAA. Maybe it would have worked, but if it didn't the program gets nuked, Urban probably doesn't come and 2014 definitely doesn't happen.
Seeing as it's quite unlikely he's tech saavy enough to have known this, but it's theoretically possible to have deleted the emails before his mailstore was backed up (usually an incremental backup type) and before the Exchange DAG was backed up. Once those emails sat in his mailstore for probably a day (guessing at their backup schedule back then, it wasn't instantaneous), it was captured in their data backup/recovery set up and then subject to data retention laws, such as they were in 2009/2010. Depending on when the Exchange DAG was backed up and what the retention period is for it, they could have been on there but "deleted" for the user for a potentially significantly longer time.
Had to go through this stuff a few dozen times around that timeframe when I worked at WPAFB. Pain in the arse.
Edit to add: I'm assuming they were using Exchange in 2009/2010 and guessing they were using some sort of Veritas NetBackup.
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