I have a habit of checking the player count on servers that I play on rather constantly. I can assure you that I remained the only person on the server during this entire fiasco. Also the sheer amount of valuable military items that were untouched further exemplifies the fact that nobody else was at the base.
One efficient and probably not-exploitable suggestion that I have for fixing this bug would be that instead of deleting items that don't fit, compare the cached array of items in the tent with the new array of items after restart and spawn the missing items on the ground inside the tent.