I dunno what possibilities they actually had. But knowing the place, I can fully believe both that they weren't allowed to check and that they never bothered.

The most likely scenario in my head was that they sent a request to the provisioning team asking for the volume to be in a different disk, and that detail never made into the technician actually doing the work (that sits on the next chair, but the requests have to come from the system).

(And the long term backups were fine. We lost 3 days of data.)