How can you loose "important work" of multiple years? -- can't be important and how can somebody _expected to become management_ be so incompetent?
"...two years of carefully structured academic work disappeared. No warning appeared. There was no undo option. Just a blank page. Fortunately, I had saved partial copies of some conversations and materials, but large parts of my work were lost forever." -- stupid: that drive could have died, the building could have burned down, the machine could have been stolen, the data could have been accidentally deleted... and all there was: "a partial" backup.
I mean, that isn't even a scenario where he didn't know about the data ("carefully structured") and discovered it wasn't covered by the backup schema (that would be a _real_ problem) Another problem would be of your churn is so high that backing up becomes a real issue (bandwidth, latency, money, ...). None of that applies.
And yet they reserve a spot in "nature" for such whining and incompetence?