Before retiring I was a network administrator. Every month we conducted tests of a disaster recovery, restoring tapes. We had bi-annual drills to restore an entire system on foreign equipment - that meant building hardware and remote connections, restoring software and data. You don't back it up unless you know you can use it if needed - quickly. Sounds like the IT staff at IRS needs to be fired and replaced (from management down).
If it involved you paying your taxes, I’m sure they would have it up and running in hours.
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.
That assumes they WANT to be able to restore the data. They don’t.