I’ve been cleaning out my house recently. There’s a lot of crud that’s just been lying around, collected through years. My wife describes me as a level 2 hoarder; she says that I would be a shoe-in for that A&E show. Going through many, many boxes that I’ve collected in the basement, I pick through each cord and think “I might need that.” I won’t need it though, so with a small mental push, I put it in the trash bag. Persistent data is a lot like that. A lot of companies have, either through policy or inertia, tons of useless information sitting on disks, or tapes, or CDs, that may be useful one day, but probably will not ever be.

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