In 1997 a company I worked for "lost" a month of fully rendered 3D video. Big deal you're saying, but 30 days of a rendering farm in 1997 was worth a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Somebody formatted the drive by accident.

This shit happens all the time, it's appallingly common. I guarantee some idiot somewhere in the chain of command said no we are not budgeting $1,000 for a couple RAID arrays or backup drives