Re: What the . . . ?
Chat logs are basically smoking guns. If you get a legal disclosure order requiring that they be divulged you have to comply sure in the knowledge that not only is recovering the data from multiple overlapping backups going to be time consuming and expensive but also that many things in them will at least "appear" to be incriminating. A solution is to make sure that they never hit a persistent backup and implement a policy that scrubs them as quickly as your users can tolerate. That way you can stand there with hand on heart and say "sorry they are not retained".
The biggest joy your lawyers have in a legal disclosure exercise is finding that documented policy is being followed meaning the data wasn't retained. The second biggest joy is finding something really really incriminating "just" outside the disclosure window.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
