IM BLOG: Tales from the Vault: Uncovering Secrets, Surprises, and Salvaged Data
Each box is like a coffin waiting to be opened. Inside: memories, evidence, discoveries, sometimes nightmares. You never quite know what you’ll find until the lid creaks open.
This blog, “Tales from the Vault”, is my attempt to share those journeys with you. Some tales will be technical. Some will be historical. Some will be so bizarre that you’ll wonder how on earth the information ever got there in the first place. But every story will carry a lesson, about risk, about preservation, about how fragile and yet how powerful data really is.
But here’s the twist: I don’t want to tell these tales alone. You, the readers, are part of this experiment. Have you stumbled upon a stack of forgotten backup drives in a cupboard? Do you have a memory of information records that were never meant to be seen again but somehow were? Have you worked on a project where data rose from the dead, or refused to come back to life at all? If so, I want to hear from you.
Take one of my favourite “I-can’t-believe-that-just-happened” moments: years ago, we were handed a mountain of archive boxes with no index and tasked with cataloguing every last one. It was slow, soul-crushing work, but we got through it, box after box, file after file, until we finally reached the very last one. And that’s when we heard it: a faint rattle in the cardboard box. Inside, wedged between two layers of cardboard, was a dusty CD. We popped it in, and there it was, a perfectly organised catalogue of every single box we had just spent weeks cataloguing by hand. If there was ever a time to laugh, cry, and pour a very large drink, that was it.
So, send us your own stories from the crypt of records and information management and we can work them into future blogs, blending them with our own case studies, so this becomes a collective narrative of hidden data adventures across the globe and even beyond.
Because in the end, archives are not dead. They’re only waiting. And sometimes, all it takes is the right touch to wake them up.
So join us. Step carefully. Keep your lantern lit. The vault is darker and more fascinating than you think!
Meet your blog author:
Guy Holmes
As a serial entrepreneur, Guy has been known to get a bee in his bonnet about a problem, and then go out and find a way to solve it. After many years of working with magnetic tape in the oil and gas sector and magnetic tape vault storage, Guy has finally drawn a line in the sand on his stance on the issue of long term storage of legacy magnetic tapes. He is now profoundly against the practice and the bloated bottom lines of companies that provide the outdated service of expensive air-conditioned rooms and courier vehicles.