It may have been accidental. There were storage rooms absolutely filled with data tapes from Apollo. These were mostly recordings of the Apollo science instruments, which were left on the surface and kept broadcasting seismic and other data for years. Of course the first couple of tapes had all the mission data, but it’s likely the people reusing the tapes thought it was just already-processed (and duplicated) seismic data they were wiping. It wasn’t until 2009 that NASA realized the error.