Originally Posted by strowger

They might have lost the data, but they probably do have backups. I think more likely is they've lost their corporate memory - the documentation of how it worked, and all the people who understood it.

In some decades of BigCorp IT experience, I've very seldom seen "data all gone, no backups", but I've seen "we fired all the expensive people who knew how it worked, and thrown away all the documentation in a sharepoint migration" plenty of times.