Not heard of hierarchical data storage?
Was a thing even in the 1990s if not a lot earlier.
Basically LRU files migrated to ever slower, cheaper storage until a friendly tape robot (Marvin?) placed the tape containing your unloved files and its fellow travellers in a storage facility. Of course retrieval times were going to be glacial. :)
I certainly advocate data management awareness and policies in academia as I know from bitter experience the sheer quantity of crud (old core files, compiler object files (.o) and binaries for long gone architectures, plus the usual downloaded movie files etc etc) found in user's home directories and project areas. Still very difficult to get across the difference between backup and archive.
Some data such as observational data can be irreproducible and should be stored forever even though it might not have been accessed for decades. There are enough stories about researchers having trouble reading 1/2 inch open reel tapes* to recover decades old data for reprocessing in the light of newer techniques and theories to validate this assertion.
Experimental data while hopefully reproducible might well have originally been from extremely costly experiments to perform and remain so. In this case the data has a dollar value which would certainly exceed the archival costs.
Data generated from computer models while eminently reproducible might take weeks or months but that would decrease as technology advances. Still CPU-Core-hours costs in energy, cost of hardware etc (TCO) which ultimately can be rendered in dollars and assessed against storage costs.
Not that any of this has anything to do with Microsoft's penny pinching shenanigans. Seems to me that these monstrous US tech companies are really trying to kneecap tertiary education and research in their own nation. Not something the PRC for all its myriad faults is foolish enough to permit there.
* And a variety of defunct media types (zip drives, magnetoptical drives, 8" floppies, tape technologies and formats etc) which are largely a lost cause. Even reading a scsi-3 disk with from an old linux host with ext2 file systems can be near impossible. "You can't get the wood you know." (Henry Crun)