There is the possibility, certainly. I'm not privy to UMG's vault protocol, but it wouldn't surprise me if the safety copies they made are/were stored with the original master tapes though and could easily have been damaged as well. The nature of 'safety copies' seems to be that they made them for a specific purpose, ie. an EQ'ed cutting master for vinyl, a rearranged track order for 8-track tapes, etc. It doesn't seem like they made 'just in case the whole place burns down' copies and stored them in seperate vaults on the other side of the country or anything.
I would think that foreign vaults might be a good place to look for safety copies of tapes if nothing could be located in the US. For example RCA Canada did all the Q8 duplication for a number of labels, including A&M, ABC, and Liberty/UA, Precision Tapes (a subsidiary of Pye, now owned by UMG) did the A&M Q8's in the UK, and King Records Japan did A&M quads, Phillips Japan did Mercury CD-4's, etc. etc. Obviously it's been 40+ years since those tapes would have been in use so there's certainly the likelihood that they were either tossed in a dumpster at some point, or returned to the original US label decades ago, but stranger things have happened. Look at the BBC, they're still finding episodes of old TV shows that they were missing (I'm thinking of Dr. Who in particular) in film vaults as disparate as Hong Kong, Nigeria and Cyprus. There's been a guy on eBay for years now who's been selling 15ips safety copies of US albums that were from the tape vault of a now defunct Yugoslavian label that did all the pressing in that country. If safety copies from a country that's gone through a civil war in the last few decades can still exist, I see no reason why the same can't be the case for relatively more sedate countries like Canada, the UK and Japan.
I would love a job as a vault sleuth if anyone's hiring!
