[lostcolony]

Please note the severity of this. It's not "We had a crash and lost a weeks worth of data" - yeah, that happens. And it's totally acceptable if you're unable to restore it, for any of the reasons you mention.

This is "We had a crash and lost over a decade's worth of data" - yeah, that shouldn't happen. Ever. If you don't have a working backup from sometime in the past 13 years, -you are doing something wrong-. That's not a small series of failures or mistakes. That's either staggering levels of incompetence, or maliciousness.

[Bartweiss]

This is exactly right. A misconfigured backup script, or a pessimal chain of crashes, or a lot of other things could lose recent data. I wouldn't be shocked by data loss.

This is decade of data. It should have been on in cold storage, on tested media, in multiple locations. No single error, or small chain of errors, should have enabled this to happen.