Don't forget the fees.
The bankruptcy lawyers will probably bill the estate more in fees on this motion than the cost of the outstanding bill.
They've had since September to worry about this. According to the document, they didn't even look into preserving the data until last month, which is long after the expiration countdown had begun.
The concern of the lawyers by the way isn't for the students. They'll get screwed regardless. It's that there may be data somewhere in there which the lawyers can trawl through which will help them in pursuing the bankruptcy proceedings.
The situation is however instructive from the point of view of companies offering cloud services. They should all have some expeditious means by which they can dump out some disks or tapes with the client's data and hand them over to the trustee as quickly as possible so they can wash their hands of the whole affair instead of getting dragged repeatedly into very expensive legal proceedings.
It's something to think about.