My colleague Vjeran just lost 3TB of video we’d shot for The Verge because the drive is no longer readable.

If they have a backup they wouldn’t have lost anything. Data is only lost when you no long have access to the last copy.

The article should have just kept to the repeated hardware failure, and not waffled on about the lost data.

Edit: Did a bit more research, and it turns out these drives are sometimes used as the primary storage for video cameras. In that case there really is no option for backup, so definitely a case where disk failures can be catastrophic.