In my country's navy, my ship had by the late 2010s assembled a huge collection of photographs and videos (nearly 2TB) going back decades stored in an external harddisk. Crew moments, evolutions, foreign exercises, you name it.

Due to OPSEC, we were suddenly informed that we were not cleared to have such a cache of material, including a few custom-made discs of the ship's earliest days from the early 1990s. This makes little sense as the harddisk has never left the ship before this. No amount of explanations could placate the security department. At a loss of what to do, my chief ordered me to consolidate the material into the harddisk and hand them over to the publicity department (outside the ship).

It turns out that they were also not cleared to receive and store the material, and refused to handle it. At the same time, the higher ups refused to give us permission to purge the contents as they were (naturally) valuable, while ordering us to rid ourselves of the harddisk. It was an impossible order and drove me mad.

In the interests of preservation, I brought home everything (against regulations), archived everything I could into a personal harddisk, and trashed the originals. I will probably submit them to a museum in the late 2090s when it doesn't matter anymore.

As for the higher ups? They are just happy that infernal harddisk is gone.