On May 19th, a new user deleted the files, apparently not realizing that this is shared storage space, because the person soon thereafter stored some of their local files there. The incident was reported to Mike and oct.
The rumor from a week ago is that there have been other legit admin priorities more immediate than recovering these, but that recovery is on the way.
Why the heck would a new user be allowed to delete files? I
hope that the File Storage package both allows and defaults to better
permissioning than that.