If there had been a current backup, there wouldn't have been a problem and I would have missed something quite educational. As usual, there's more to the story:

The operator was short of time so she skipped the backup. In fact, she skipped the entire process last month so there were twice as many records to move to history. She started the Monthly Close and noticed it was running slowly so she began answering email on the same workstation. She switched back to check its progress several times. It was on one of these occasions that the workstation froze followed closely by the server. The task being executed at that moment was the query of 14K+ records and their memo fields into a temporary table on the local drive.

Upon closer questioning, it turns out that her workstation only has 128K RAM. With Windows 2K as the OS, this memory-intensive task, Outlook, and who knows what else running on that workstaion, it really isn't much of a mystery why the workstation gave up, but I am mystified 1) how this could bring down the server and 2) why data was lost. The source table should still have been intact on the server as the query was being run.