Re: You just never know...
I've had some old requests. One company wanted an explanation a couple of years ago of ~$10k of due payments that were showing up in a report as not having been paid; we had to restore a system we'd decommissioned in 2015 to investigate what had happened to them, but the payments they were asking about were from the 2008 kind of era, so you'd think they could have asked a little earlier. (The big one that was almost all the total was paired with an equal negative amount which was also showing unpaid; most of the others had been paid, but the invoice had been transferred to from a subsidiary to their main company, so it didn't get picked up properly in the data update that got the payment information out of the old system. I think in the end they technically owed us a bit, but we obviously weren't going to press them for it.)
I was less successful when we had a legal request (for a court case) to recover all payments made to a certain vendor ever. We could give them back to ~2006 OK, but before that payment information would have had to be dug out of our (current - 3) system, which was an Access database with a custom front end. Which I was reasonably familiar with, and which I'm pretty sure were backed up to offline storage (they were backed up initially to our fileserver, and some years later we had a big push to archive unused stuff off the fileserver to offline storage), but neither I nor anyone else I asked who'd been around in that sort of era could work out where those archives actually were now, or if they still existed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
