In reply to Bartek.

You are correct, but most companies SAS WORK area generally runs 75% full each day. So the odds of another SAS session creating a SAS WORK directory and writing over the disks from a previous SAS session are very high.

Also, SAS does not write in contiguous disk space on a single disk, it writes the SAS data files across multiple disks. As soon as any segment of the previous SAS data file that was written is written over, then the entire SAS data file can not be restored.