Why don’t you just restore it? It’s naive to think that something will not happen (or drive you crazy) if there’s a set of preventive measures. Think how much respect and loyalty you could earn by reversing the irreversible, especially if you play it like “usually we can’t but in your case I’ll assign a system administrator to see if it’s possible to restore it from backups”. You can even describe this exact conversation in help/FAQ — none of these folks read them and if it gets viral they couldn’t blame you for trickery.