I have no idea what happened to the boxes of 9-track tapes from some satellite missions with which I was involved. They may have been thrown away by one of the successor companies. There's no organizational interest in that data, anyway, as much of it was essentially duplicate data received at other locations.

Then there was the mass spectrometer data taken during the flight, in which there was considerable interest. The data was backed up to a certain cartridge-type tape drive. The drive failed. The manufacturer was called: "The number you have reached is no longer a working number..."

Could the data have been retrieved through other means? Probably. Was the extra money spent to do so? No. Has it made a detectable disturbance in the Force? Again,... no.

There are many, many examples of knowledge, recorded data, and physical items getting lost (or otherwise made inaccessible) through "organizational entropy", technological evolution, and so on. Of course, in the conspiracist cartoon view of reality, such things can't happen; it's always part of the eeevil master plan, or at the very least Highly Suspicious.

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