The people who laid off 85% of the IT dept.

Everything is fine. Why would you need a backup?

My ex company had for more than 10 years keept all the data customers shared with us. Structured and standardized, should have been easy peasy.

Somehow they were "appending wrong" in some way and data was useless. In think they were trying to reduce the size by aggregating a bit, but they did in a way that rendered the data useless.

Of course the CEO wanted to train models with it anyway...

Penny counters who don't like paying for storage

Backups are always considered to be too expensive up until the point that not having backups becomes more expensive. This applies to redundancy of all kinds except the one that means firing employees for not setting up the other kinds.

Apparently someone in the South Korean goverment xD

I say that often. Especially after I forget to back something up and lose it.

I doubt anyone said it verbatim, but it happens that they're deemed lower priority ad infinitum.

♫♫ Where Is My Mind? ♫♫ plays

In the background, explosions rip through buildings and they start to collapse.

Last time we lost disks at work, there were full backups.

They were just in the same disks as the data. And because everything is abstracted two times into virtual disks on virtual machines, and containers and volumes, the people responsible for the backups didn't even know it.