I ran an overhead-funded data storage archive including multiple identical NAS on different campuses and a super fancy offsite tape archive. The researchers would rather buy a USB drive than do the paperwork to get more space because they had to explain why they needed more space. It was just paperwork, and not even mine. It served to justify our own grant requests so they didn’t have to include data storage as part of their grant.

Anyway, their life’s research is on a set of these drives, with plenty of duplication to avoid the disk failure gnome. One day, all the drives disappeared. Tuns out the researcher normally left the drives on a desk, unsecured, in a ground floor office on an urban college campus. No cameras could see the office, so it could have been anyone.

It’s literally a miracle that stuff didn’t walk 24/7.

Maybe someone unsafely unplugged the drive and corrupted it?