I'm an IT professional, you would be surprised how many people just keep a .pst on their local hard drive with all their emails on it which eventually dies even though they are trained to put them on the network share.
I had a service company that maintained the backup tape drives for a government installation for about ten years. They could produce anything they wanted, no ifs ands or buts.
It would be interesting to see who's been hired and who's been fired in that chain of command of people overseeing the backups, since this nonsense started.