> When Pixar employees went looking for the lost data, they discovered that the backup systems were not working properly—and nobody was aware until it was too late.

I've been in several companies where we discovered that the backups didn't really work. What on earth were we paying the IT people for if they never tested file recovery?

Doing all the other things deemed more high- priority by the business (like meeting SOC-2 audit requirements; answering field questions about network architecture because people don’t read documents; scaling subsystems for customer-specific demos; yadda yadda). I would bet good money the IT people had a ticket saying we need to test the backups regularly that kept getting deprioritized.