Comment by zxcvbn4038

This sounds to me like the classic “replication is not backups” situation where (at best) all of the user files were stored in RAID array someplace and that is what the malware ate. If there had been actual backups and effective backups then it should have been trivial to restore non-corrupted files. It also sounds like someone made the decision not to backup the raw images because they were “big” - that is actually the one thing they should have backed up because all of the smaller files can be regenerated from the raw ones. I would not be surprised if all of this was running under someone’s desk.