Once upon a time a civil servant had to state a reason for using a taxi rather than public transport if they wished to claim the fare on expenses. Many moons ago an acceptable reason was Heavy box of computer print out to carry
It seems like the dark ages now. Green lined, sprocket-holed, concertina-folded page after page for what now seem like ridiculously small amounts of information. I should think a whole fleet of pantechnicons would have been needed to transport something like the Child Benefit database, which would have taken about a year to print out at 10 characters/second
Things moved on a bit when data could be transported on cinema-sized reels of magnetic tape. But even these could justify a taxi. You were not allowed to take them on the Tube because of fears of data corruption
Then there were the unintended security encryptions caused by the importing computer not being able to make sense of the header labels supplied by the exporting machine
So in a way I guess we are now losing data just because we can - it is just so easy to lose a CD down the back of the settee
