I had a client as of a couple of years ago with a custom fronted software build on top of an access mdb database running on windows 98 continuously since 2000. They had been backing it up onto a 18 year old 1GB flash drive every night for years. Their interest was exactly zero in upgrading to anything newer.
They probably had an advanced distributed snapshot backup system. Where any and all employees that used the file in the last 10 years had a version of it saved from a point in time–potentially even on their personal machines or as email attachments to their personal emails.
I once got called in to diagnose why it took 5 minutes to open up a single Excel file. The PC itself was a little dated and underpowered, but the file size was huuuge…like hundreds of MB.
It finally opened. There was ugly table-formatting…to the entire spreadsheet. Colored cell borders, alternating background fill, text and font formatting applied to every single cell; columns A-IV and rows 1-65,536. I pointed that out and said the only way to fix is start a new one and not apply the formatting, or to try and remove it from all the cells. She outright refused because she liked the way it was. So I left, and she went back to looking at pictures of her cats
I once worked for an organization that maintained a 10+ year old single excel file with no discernable backups for regulatory data.
The bar is low.
I had a client as of a couple of years ago with a custom fronted software build on top of an access mdb database running on windows 98 continuously since 2000. They had been backing it up onto a 18 year old 1GB flash drive every night for years. Their interest was exactly zero in upgrading to anything newer.
They probably had an advanced distributed snapshot backup system. Where any and all employees that used the file in the last 10 years had a version of it saved from a point in time–potentially even on their personal machines or as email attachments to their personal emails.
Close. Each employee had a tab.
I once got called in to diagnose why it took 5 minutes to open up a single Excel file. The PC itself was a little dated and underpowered, but the file size was huuuge…like hundreds of MB.
It finally opened. There was ugly table-formatting…to the entire spreadsheet. Colored cell borders, alternating background fill, text and font formatting applied to every single cell; columns A-IV and rows 1-65,536. I pointed that out and said the only way to fix is start a new one and not apply the formatting, or to try and remove it from all the cells. She outright refused because she liked the way it was. So I left, and she went back to looking at pictures of her cats