Yeah, this is absolute nonsense to anyone with even the slightest knowledge about information storage. Redundancy has been a thing since pre internet days. I'm not educated with anything to do with I.T but I have shadowed employees of that field. I shadowed one that dealt with the storage of client cases at a law firm. The whole team dealt with this part of the job but it was a rotating shift basically. Their policy was to have at least 3 levels of redundancy. That doesn't include the (internal?) redundancy. It was stored on the local pc. It was also stored on a local server, along with every one of their other buildings servers. Then it was stored at a 3rd party's facility off site. That off site facility was equipped with security, hand print verification, password that changed every 2 minutes, floating floors with cooling systems under it, and an emergency system that would lock it down and (if I remember right) suck the oxygen out of the room in the event of a fire as to not damage the electronics. This was at least 10 years ago. If they had this kind of back up for a small to middle sized law firm 10 years ago, I'd imagine there is no way a police force didn't have this shit backed up somewhere. They just dumped it for whatever reason.