He supposedly had 50TB+ worth of data sitting at his place. This almost seems inaccurate as that's like 25 x 2TB drives.My wife works in electronic discovery, processing huge caches of corporate documents for complex litigation. 50tb is a lot of data but it's not that much in organizational terms. From what I remember when her firm was processing material for the SEC-Goldman Sachs litigation over the financial crisis (a case which involved several years of discovery work), they were dealing with a roughly similar quality, 30 or 60tb of data. I've got an unopened 5tb drive sitting right here on my desk.
No offense, but I feel you're arguing against the existence of large trucks because you've never had any reason to drive one.
You think they would be watching everything like a hawk.
You would, but in my experience managers pay about as much attention to IT people as they do to the janitors. That goes double for contractors, because the buyers tend to assume security screening and so on was built into the terms of the contract. At one point I was the only IT guy for a small private bank in London; I was contracted to work for Digital Equipment Corp, who in turn had the corporate contract with this bank due the contractual arrangements between DEC and the much larger corporate parent of the private bank.
I got the job because their existing guy fired or quit in a hurry or something and they were desperate. Technically it was easy, I just ran backups, did a few service calls around the office each day if anyone had a problem, and most of the actual work consisted of passing on the bank's procurement requests to the DEC people. Eventually I lost the gig because the bank got sick of dealing with DEC and terminated the contract but I got glowing personal references which was nice.
I remember being sort of amazed at the degree of freedom I had. As you may know, small private banks cater exclusively to the ultra-rich, and I was the only IT person on site and had total access to anything. If I were more financially oriented I could have enriched myself in any number of ways.