"Okay folks, time to put all those backup tapes in a station wagon and drive 'em here, it's restore time!" -- "Sir... we don't have tapes anymore... we had a private cloud..."
tax office. i am sure lots of Aussies are broken up over this.
If the government shuts down due to the lack of funding, they will likely get broken up.
This is how Mad Max starts.
1PB of data is hopefully hard to lose, there must be a way to recover a significant portion of it.
Either way, it's a disaster for HPE's reputation.
Purging 1PB of data would take an awful lot of time.
You can lose unlimited amounts of data almost instantaneously though: if it's encrypted with a key, just purge the key.
Or you could encrypt it to tape and get bitten by an HPE firmware bug:
You don't really need to purge all of it, it can be sufficient to lose eg. crypto keys, metadata or indices to effectively shred much larger amounts of data.