Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest questions, if you don't mind: - What types of systems are these? - When you say "40 year history", do you mean the system was originally written in the 70's, or do you mean it has data going back to then? - Why do you need to keep data for 30 years? Regulatory reasons? Reporting? Or just long-lived data? I'm not doubting anything you're saying. It's easy to imagine systems with those attributes, say, in bankin…
No problem -- I'm really passionate about this topic! .gov stuff. Every state in the union has social services systems that were stood up in the 60s and 70s, and have or are being transitioned over time from whatever mainframe they were in to modern stuff. Usually the long term stuff is retained. These folks deal with situations like disabled children who become wards of the state. Their records need to exist well un…
BTW, I think you're 100% correct about this becoming more important / more of a visible problem. On a small scale, it's something I wrestle with often. For example, I love the convenience of buying a book on my Kindle, but I'm reminded of the joy of wandering through my grandparents' library and wonder if my daughter (and so on) will be able to have a similar experience – what happens to those my Amazon purchases after I'm gone? Another example is that I keep a sporadic journal in Evernote. Should I really be printing out those writings in case I have a curious descendant? I've enjoyed reading letters and journals of ancestors.
On the other hand, digitalization has obvious benefits too. But we have to be deliberate in our curation and storage format.
For example, it's great that correspondence (email) is now automatically archived rather than it being a tedious process (carbon copy, hand-copying, etc.). But how many people backup their email out of their cloud provider to a personally owned copy in a human-readable format? I actually do backup my Gmail account occasionally. But I doubt my wife knows where it is. Or if she'd be able to look past the XML format. And even if she did, there are literally millions of emails in there from mailing lists and work stuff and spam and whatever. The percentage of actual meaningful correspondence is unbelievably low.
I don't know. It's a big problem, I think.