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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

You can be sarcastic but there is no reason you've said why emails and documents of a few megabytes can't be permanently saved by companies using Exabytes of data. Make your point

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Understanding the intricacies of large enterprise data and all the forms it can take is an exercise left to the reader. It isn't simple and I'm not sure why anyone would think it is. There isn't just like, a single fileshare you have to monitor. There are many more numbers than just X amount of data.

In a world where I’ve had a dossier in some corporate database since Rapleaf in 2007, I’m completely unwilling to accept your opinion that basic document retention based on account id is more complicated than I’m assuming. edit: the only things that I can see motivating it's lack of existence is lack of law and the desire for greater profitability. nothing technical has prevented it

How many times has the company changed their archiving service? How many datacenters do they have? How many network shares? What about one drive? Local docs? Gsuite? Remote profile accounts on RDS servers? AS400 shares? What about CAD cloud docs? How many times has the email archiving service changed? Warm storage vs cold storage? How will that be managed? When does it go into read only state? How are you tracking document changes? What about SharePoint docs and lists? Do you need to save vm snapshots? And on and on.

You're talking like doing anything at a company is impossible when the company is only that large because they employ people to do many things. Everything on your list is just a job for a few people with some executive decisions. Maybe even just a list to feed into an LLM

Some of those decisions should just be forced by law.

No, I'm saying a limit on data retention time is an obvious thing.

Everything you listed, including the on and on, is immaterial to the point I'm making. You're just listing the costs of doing business. I'm not saying there are no challenges, especially given how history has unfolded. I'm saying that in a world where google has maintained a copy of my gmail account since 2004, its reasonable that we should have written into law "If you send an official communication to a customer you must maintain a record of that communication which can be obtained by request of the customer or customer's estate until the dissolution of the company (upon which the state government would take custody)", and if we had, along with all the downstream effects from implementing such a law, we would live in a better society. I'm not saying it wouldn't be expensive and potentially dangerous given how poor we are at data protection presently, but IMO it would be worth it compared to the shitshow we inhabit.

So a lawn maintenance company and Google should have the same data retention standards? It isn't free.

Who said anything like that? You seem to be jumping to conclusions rather than actually considering my point.

Apparently it's way too hard and complicated for a multi-billion dollar enterprise to retain documents but quite easy to tell clients how to evade taxes.

What a fucked up world.

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