Our IT is looking across the whole data estate to look at costing up an exit strategy for 3 + 12 years of archiving and data retention, which is a mandatory requirement for our Govt-related project. We would be looking at low-availability cold storage, as we aren't looking to keep the lights on once this stage of the project is complete (which will be in 3 years' time).
What is Esri’s general approach to backwards compatibility for data, for such a lengthy period of time. I know that even between Pro 3.3 and 3.5 there are issues, so I cannot imagine a version of the software being able to read the data we're creating now.
Does anyone know if Esri (Inc) has a strategy for this sort of thing? In an ideal world Safe Software would be working with Esri to maintain a series of workbenches to do this, but to my knowledge this has never even been discussed.
Any thoughts?