It sounds like a “dog ate my homework” excuse for the cloud age, but Euro-cloud Scaleway says one of its solid-state disks was stolen from a truck, turned up in the hands of a YouTuber, and has now made its way back home.

A Saturday post by CEO Yann Lechelle revealed that over a year ago, a disk was stolen while in transit between two Scaleway data centres.

The disk disappeared, and Scaleway warned clients about the incident.

Then, nothing happened until, according to Lechelle, a YouTuber bought the disk on a classifieds site. Specifically, a YouTuber who creates content about the persistence of data even after disks are formatted.

Lechelle says Scaleway worked with the YouTuber to recover the disk. The video creator has written to Scaleway with assurances they have not copied the data contained on the disk.

The CEO says recovering the disk has helped authorities to advance their investigations into the heist, and meant the company felt able to disclose the theft.

The cloudy company has since revisited its data transfer policies, and now ships disks in sealed cases equipped with GPS trackers. Obviously it has no desire to have to explain such an improbable security story – for any incident of any origin – ever again. ®