Corporations are often also bad at archiving information that is of direct benefit to themselves. One instance that I am personally familiar with is keeping all the designs of past products in the live design system and relying on the backup system to ensure that they don't get lost instead of deliberately copying them to a curated archive.
Of course this didn't work. I remember getting a call from a designer asking me to restore a file. I asked when he had last seen it so that I could go and pick the right tapes from the fire safe. But he then said that he wasn't sure exactly when but that it was at least two years earlier. We reused our tapes annually so he was completely out of luck and had to reverse engineer the design in question. Turning what should have been half an afternoon's job into a week of work.
The problem comes when you change to a new CAD system and don't bother to convert all of the existing designs. Eventually there is no one left in the company who remembers where the old stuff is, assuming it still exists, and you have no way of reading it anyway. Not a big problem if you are just making throwaway toys but a serious problem if you are expected to maintain machines over a fifty year lifetime. In the past a big engineering company would have a drawing office archive and even have a librarian. Now disk space is so cheap we can store everything but we can't make use of it because file formats become obsolete in a way that drawings on paper never do.
Of course this didn't work. I remember getting a call from a designer asking me to restore a file. I asked when he had last seen it so that I could go and pick the right tapes from the fire safe. But he then said that he wasn't sure exactly when but that it was at least two years earlier. We reused our tapes annually so he was completely out of luck and had to reverse engineer the design in question. Turning what should have been half an afternoon's job into a week of work.