Data safe in the cloud?

A few weeks ago my help was requested to recover data from 12! disks from a data center.

I outline the situation: A company in Canada stores its data in the cloud at a data center. They assume that their data is safe somewhere in Canada.

In the data center, a programmer creates a script and accidentally puts the line rm -rf in the wrong place. This Linux command line was accidentally executed, and 12 hard drives with a total of 24 TB of data were erased.

Suddenly the company in Canada could no longer access its data.

1st problem: At Contacting the data center shows that their data is in France!

2nd problem: Anyone who knows anything about Linux knows that with the Ext3 file system, as used here, the rm command deletes the inodes. This makes it impossible to retrieve the data with its original structure. Only if you shut down the computer very quickly after executing the command, you still have a chance to retrieve data by using the journal.

In this case, the problem was only discovered after a weekend. So there was plenty of time for the inodes to be deleted.

Traces of the data were still found, but only a few gigabytes. Everything can still be found via raw recovery, but that is of no use to the client because file names and locations have disappeared, and that was paramount in this case.

Lost case :-(

My data safe in the cloud? My thoughts!