[pvaldes]

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.

[burning_hamster]

They are fighting for storage because funding agencies only pay for new research, not the preservation of old research funded by someone else.

[jryb]

-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.