I was there at the time this happened. They were doing backups, but not testing them. The version of tar being used, from IRIX, I think, used 32-bit file offsets and couldn't back up more than 4GB of data to one file. The TS2 models and animation files took up more than that and it overflowed the maximum file size. The moral is that untested backups aren't backups.
If she wouldn't have had the backup in her house, couldn't you have simply restored the files from the original disks? Of course you would have to rebuild the folder structure somehow, but that would be the work of some days, not months, right?
Same era we had a backup that wrote to a DAT tape "/dev/nrst0", Somebody mis-typed it and the backups were all going to a file "/dev/nstr0" - we only noticed when somebody claimed they could read the backup with the tape ejected !
SunOS version mid 1990s - you had to be root to run the backup script AND you could create files in /dev without warning AND / and /home were in the same partition so it had lots of space
