Common situation. Crammed labs and busy to death researchers fighting for each inch of freeze storage.
They had a 25 years for splitting the irreplaceable samples into a backup copy. The problem is that spending time in management that does not produce papers is normally frowned upon and seen as procrastinating in science. A serious effort is still missing to introduce sample backups by routine on lab cultures and protocols.
-80s aren't normally used as archives, rather they usually contain engineered strains of various organisms that would take a very long time to recreate.
They had a 25 years for splitting the irreplaceable samples into a backup copy. The problem is that spending time in management that does not produce papers is normally frowned upon and seen as procrastinating in science. A serious effort is still missing to introduce sample backups by routine on lab cultures and protocols.