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.
I got called to a 12 year old server with a failed HDD once. They said no problem we have a daily backup. Just put in a new drive and restore from tape.
The tape wouldn’t read. I took it out of the drive and noticed some brown specs and dust falling out.
The tape was clear, like scotch tape. They backed up daily to the same tape for over 10 years without verification. The remnants of the magnetic layer was scattered inside the drive.
That client became pretty sad pretty fast.
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
People do silly things. We have a department at work which pulls data from our ERP system to excel. They’re pulling 10’s of thousands of rows to return only a few bits of detail like product descriptions for a handful of items. I’ve offered to help them but they really don’t want help. They seem to be happy with this monster.
There’s another department which runs reports from our BI system, exports it to Excel, adds some calculations, then builds reports from that. They literally just need to ask the BI analyst to build them a report to their requirements.
I’m convinced people like screwing around in excel because it gives them something creative to do in an otherwise bland job.
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.
