It may seem easier for officials to delete an e-mail than shred a memo, but all e-mails that are deleted are not lost, computer engineer Michael Bame said.

Bame works at East River Computer Services, a Blacksburg company that offers data recovery and security services to businesses and local governments.

When someone "empties the trash" on a computer or an e-mail system, "all it's doing is deleting the [file's] name. The data is still there on the hard drive. We have tools where we can go in and recover that," Bame said.

Many companies and governments also regularly copy all the information on their computer systems to special backup tapes.

They are the "easiest place to find old e-mails people think they've deleted," Bame said. "There can be several weeks to months to a year or two worth of e-mails there."

Bame said his company has recovered e-mails from many government computers in Southwest Virginia.

Forrest Landon, director of the nonprofit Virginia Coalition for Open Government and a former editor at The Roanoke Times, can remember only one recent case in which a journalist demanded that an official hand over his computer for scrutiny.

Doug Harwood, publisher of a monthly newspaper called The Rockbridge Advocate, accused a county official of deleting public e-mails and demanded that the computer be combed for documents.

The county apologized but didn't turn over the hard drive. Harwood couldn't afford to press the matter in court, he said.

But citizens and watchdogs should "insist that technology experts be brought in to look at a hard drive in ways that regular people can't," Landon said. The burden is on government officials to "be a hundred percent certain that document doesn't exist."