It’s also entirely possible that he was literally in the process of backing it up. He could have loaded the data onto it, then gone to plug it to his computer to back it up when it suddenly failed. The article doesn’t go into enough detail to draw a conclusion on what he did or didn’t do, but the point is clearly that a drive this new and with few write cycles should not be completely failing.
It’s also entirely possible that he was literally in the process of backing it up. He could have loaded the data onto it, then gone to plug it to his computer to back it up when it suddenly failed. The article doesn’t go into enough detail to draw a conclusion on what he did or didn’t do, but the point is clearly that a drive this new and with few write cycles should not be completely failing.