[scaglio]

This rises a potential problem, often underrated by companies: some have backups with infinite retention.

It is common to have backups with retention of 10 years, some may have 20 years for legal reasons… but the majority of people don't understand the difference between "readable" and "usable".

Of course, it depends on the data… And there are companies backing up whole virtual machines with infinite retention, believing to be able to run them: it is hard enough to restore a vSphere 5.x machine on a brand new vSphere 8, I really don't understand this waste of space.

[rvnx]

If you backup all, you can sort later, and even eventually never. It costs 1 USD per month at Google Cloud to store 1TB of data.

At this price it's not worth sorting, when one single devops costs 100 USD+ per hour, not including the opportunity cost of not working on something more productive (and less boring for the developer).

Then X years after the company is acquired, or sufficient time has lapsed, you can delete / drop the data without sorting.

Regarding virtual machines, if it's VMDK for example, you can read the raw disks without booting it, and again, it's not worth taking a risk to lose data to potentially save 10 USD per month, which is similar to one developer taking one beer extra at a team event.

[scaglio]

> if it's VMDK for example, you can read the raw disks without booting it

Yes, but that's the difference between "readable" and "usable". Many companies don't realize the technical difficulties to be able to run the VMs. They just expect that it will work, if needed.

[actionfromafar]

Often an old file or disk image is tiny compared to modern file sizes.

So the waste of space is more of an administrative character than a waste of disk space.