From what I'm seeing that pilot is about NTOPS (National Total Operation Platform System) which they use to manage everything, and since this was on the floor above the fire it made recovery a lot more complicated

There's a high chance i'm missing something though, where did you read about a G-Drive backup system?

G-Drive is the name of their bespoke file storage system that was taken down by the fire.

It’s federated anyway, similar to email. One account can take you anywhere, so if you make your own "guild" the users could just directly participate from matrix.org (or any other home(server))