I like the thought that someone thinks that the $12.95 I pay, is so the tech can spend hours helping someone else recover the items they lost. It's not for that. If it is, I wan't a discount since I don't use the service.
It's not just that one $12.95 fee that you've paid. It's more like the 12.95 x all the months someone has played the game and not asked for restore services. Compound that with how many acccounts never even used the service. Yeah..... may be a bit out of whack. THAT is the point about the revenue they bring in vs. the level of support being offered.

And as for that tech that would be pulled off other duties....the techs (note it could be more than one involved, as different aspects of the issue will likely be departmentalized) could be hired specifically to handle the various tasks involved. Someone could be assigned specific tasks like looking into what really happened and what course of action could/should be taken, etc. Once the go-ahead is given, then it may be passed off to a DBA to conduct the restore. It could even be someone on the DBA team that would be conducting the investigation aswell, but it would first be fielded by someone in another department first and then passed off to an individual or team to investigate, evaluate, and if so assigned, to implement a course of action. This all would be part of each individual's regularly assigned duties.

As for the actual restore process, it would likely be handled by someone hired with database administration as one of their primary responsibilities (if not their only responsibility). In other words, this process could be part of their routine job duties. Such a person would have the knowledge, the tools, and the responsibility for conducting/verifying, securing, and ensuring viable backups of the database(s) take place (once established, most of this is automated for the most part), as well as for extracting data from a backup to a temp database (or in the event of catastrophic recovery, directly to the production environment--again, once established, most of this process is automated after an initial config is setup), reviewing it for integrity, scripting (or editing a template script...again, established protocol) for any needed import/update process, verifying a clean import/update took place, validating it as viable for the production environment and then reactivating the account/database. All of this would be calculated into the cost analysis for supporting the game and included in the budget that EVERYONE's 12.95+ a month helps to pay for.

Depending on the specific needs of a given organization it can get pricey (off-site data escrow services around 1k a month for a small group, annual software contract agreements for in-house backup systems, costs of media used, etc....prices can be all over the map depending on just what your needs are)--but again, all of that gets budgeted in advance and such and had been done in the scope of FFXI support to be provided for that $12.95/month based on the life expectancy of a typical user account against the likelyhood of that account needing to be restored at the time it was reviewed.

And therein lies the problem. This was a policy decision made roughly a DECADE AGO and is likely grossly outdated and in need of revision seeing how the parameters for that evaluation have likely changed. Perhaps the once-only option was viable back then for a 4 year account or something....but we are looking at much older accounts for a large sector of the playerbase now, which should call for a review of that policy. Maybe after so many years, your once-only could get a reset...otherwise you pay-as-you-go if you need it again.

Things have changed dramatically since all this was initially set up and it's about time to rethink some things.