On Feb 26, 2019, at 11:11 AM, ChUIMonster wrote: > > one huge problem that always occurs when people archive old data is that they fail to keep the old code that knew how to operate on that data including the old versions of operating systems and other software (and possibly hardware too) needed to read the old data. this can be a yuuge problem. people tend to forget things. when you save backups for years, can you actually read them today? are your software upgrades and changes documented well enough that you can determine what is needed to read a three year old backup? or seven years? if you archive to tape, do you have drives that can read the cartridges to which you wrote them? is there documentation for how to read the data? where is it? how do you know? if you get a subpoena for data from 2010, how will you respond? the best response is "we do not have that data. in accordance with our data retention policies, we deleted it in 2017". when you do save old data, how do you know you still need it? "just in case" is not good enough - maybe you only need a few summaries.
