I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/ waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail. The old Internet. I still have that game btw.
As someone storing important stuff on ZoL on my desktop, this is concerning to read. OTOH I'm 4+ years in, I've never had an issue, and I have backups (outside of the zfs volume itself).