I was talking to a couple of former colleagues today, and what they were telling me about missing Law of the Sea data subsequent to their time in the organisation reminded me of an instance I bumped into some years ago. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when a geological organisation sent out geologists to do geological mapping, the geologists use airphotos as a base and drew their interpretation of the geology on a clear plastic overlay on the airphoto. Any localities they sampled for rocks and fossils, were punched through the photo using a pin or needle, and the locality number written on the back of the photo adjacent to that hole. The locality number was recorded in their field notebook, with the details of any observations, and any rocks or fossils collected at the site. Again, back in those days there was no such thing as a database useful for such information. The data and interpretations were compiled onto a draft geological map of the area. As a consequence, to keep track of the localities, a card system was used, with the locality number, and the other information transcribed from the field notebook. The assorted cards for the localities whence collected fossils came, would then have further details inserted when the samples had been examined by a palaeontologist. This was to give an assessment of the age of the collection of fossils, thereby giving an age for the rock unit from which they came and which appeared on the map. This stuff was part of the basis for understanding the structure of this continent.
With the advent of computers and databases, it was decided that all the fossil locality cards would be scanned and inserted as images into the database, and the basic data (e.g. locality number, rock unit etc.) from those images transcribed to the database. To this end, a friend of mine was employed to scan all the cards, and there were several thousand of them. This was largely finished (~90%) before the money ran out. Some time later it was found that someone had decided to delete the entire database, scanned images included. So, someone else had to be employed to scan them all again. Having learnt from the previous shemozzle, copies of these latest card scans are now everywhere, so that no half-witted manager can again decide that they should be deleted, thereby wasting public funds yet again.
You can’t (shouldn’t be able to) just delete a corporate database. Even if it was “accidentally” removed from a corporate system there should be a rollback provision, and if not then there should be backup avaiulable from corporate IT systems. That was always the case in the organisation where I worked. That said one particular division was renowned in-house for its poor approach to corporate data management.