Sounds to me like this operation was second rate and not run professionally. If this sort of incident is even able to happen, you're doing it wrong. Maybe it's just my experience with highly bureaucratic oil and gas companies, but the customer database has no backup for 2 months?!?!?!?!?!?!

That is asinine. What would they have done if they couldn't pin it on a junior engineer? A disk failure would have blown them out of the water. I think he did them a favor, and hopefully they learned from that.