Whoa whoa...speaking as Admin who has many years before retirement, let’s not throw IT under the bus. No technical person, with knowledge of this system, has gone under oath saying “It’s too hard to do a restore”. These are all political hacks covering their collective asses.
Yes, I was a little harsh about the IT guys at IRS. I've seen a lot of politics played, and hated that. People aren't allowed to do their jobs because of political games. For instance, earlier in my career we had a failure of a major system and the application folks were panicking. I told my boss I could fix it in 30 minutes and he stopped me and let it sit broken for 2 days. I was pissed at us looking incompetent. He gave me the go-ahead to fix it after he got approval to buy a couple hundred-thousands of dollars in new storage equipment. I've seen a lot of bs played in IT and it sucked.