What irritates me is that he was willing to put so much effort into restoring the video file. Usually you would only do that if the files are important. But if the files are important, then you would definitely have a second copy of it (backup). Always have a backup is the real learning here.
It is also recommended to automate data related tasks as much as possible. If you have a human doing mv per ssh regulary or semi-regulary, then there is always the risk of a typo or some other kind of human error. I would rather expect that such an error would happen over a long enough time period, than not.
In this case, they explicitly called out that they decided not to make backups of these files, and maybe you’re right that they chose the wrong trade offs and the amount of engineering time they spent recovering cost more than just keeping a backup.
But let’s say they were taking backups. “Always have a backup” turns out not always be enough.
Perhaps the overwritten file was new enough that it hadn’t been backed up yet.
Perhaps they didn’t realize their mistake until after the backup process had run, and the backup no longer contained the file they had overwritten.
Perhaps they attempted to restore the overwritten file from backup and discovered that the backup process had actually been failing but they had insufficient testing or notifications.
Point is, backups have an engineering, hardware, and complexity cost, too. I don’t know enough about their tradeoffs to judge them for making the wrong decision here.
That said, I do agree that in general, the default choice should be automated backups, with multiple sets for different time intervals, in a mixture of on- and off-site storage, with regular automated restoration tests.
As for the other (non-default) cases, I think one have to make it very clear and be precise about why a backup is not needed or why the company decided against it.
I have observed that basically no one thinks about backups until they've had at least one incident where they've lost something important to them and were unable to recover it. The actual number varies from person to person, but I've never seen less than 1, though I have seen more than 5 on several occasions.
If that happens on your home computer - fine, lesson learned. But we are talking about production in a company. I'm pretty sure, that not anyone had to tell the boss: Sorry, I just deleted an important file from production without a backup. Therefore, in order to prevent such a conversation, we should take measures to prevent it.
I'm pretty sure it also happens quite often, but of course instant automatic backups should be setup in that case, because companies are more important then people.
It is also recommended to automate data related tasks as much as possible. If you have a human doing mv per ssh regulary or semi-regulary, then there is always the risk of a typo or some other kind of human error. I would rather expect that such an error would happen over a long enough time period, than not.