OK, so I'm a Luddite. There are times when the older methods work best. One example was the space qualified integrated circuits that we made for NASA. Test data was to be kept for 25 years - and it was. On 12 inch discs........and I don't mean vinyl music phonograph records. Even NASA couldn't read them - they had to pay some US firm who had the equipment a vast sum to get them re-formatted.....
[story]Many years ago, my company made a radar processor, for a country that will remain nameless. The program for developing this processor happened while I was living in Germany for a few years. I never even knew the program existed. But, apparently, the country did not want to fix the circuit boards in the system. They only wanted to replace the ones that broke. So about 20 years after the initial program, they wanted to purchase replacement boards.
Well, after 20 years, there was only one person left, that originally worked on the program, and most of the ICs were obsolete and difficult to find. Well the purchasing people pulled off a miracle and found all of the parts. But now, they had the new boards made, but there was a ATP (Acceptance Test Procedure) that all the boards needed to pass. The ATP was run on a custom computer (Sun 3E) with multiple specialized test boxes. My job was to recreate the whole test system.
I managed to find the original computer, with a custom built interface. After a lot of searching, found the original software on several spools of 9-track tape. Then I had to guess as to how the system was put together. It took a lot of work, but I managed to put the whole system back together. The company made a bundle of money on that project. Pretty much, the whole program was nothing but profit. The program manager received lots of accolades from upper management. They barely gave me any notice at all. It seems that resurrecting a 20 year old program was my job.
But about 5 years later, they came back, with their hats in their hands, and asked me to put the computer system back together again. It seems that they had another pure profit contract. But, no one had the foresight to store the important components of the computer system. It wasn't my job to archive everything. Once the project was over, I couldn't charge my time any more. So when I went to find the all important computer, I found out that they had thrown it out. So I had to inform them that they couldn't fulfill the contract without the computer. Of course, now, I was the bad guy. They had to go back to the country and tell them they needed to buy a new radar processor.[/story]