> Actual people with real jobs were repeatedly refused, while insiders who knew how to fill out paperwork, and apparently knew where the blind spots were, filed hundreds of claims in the early pandemic days.

This is simply how every bureaucracy works at all levels. And Unix systems as well :/ Your system comes with cron and tar, you just have to know they exist and how can they be used. And to know that, you just have to read up relevant man pages, and to pull up man pages, you just...

... well I guess you can also hand couple grands to that dude over there mixing a peanut butter jar with fingers who apparently knows how to write a backup scripts and how to run it as a cron job.

I guess it's some sort of unsolved hard problem to make systems that are self sustaining, fair, and easy, that works reliably.