> "Half the storage budget goes to files nobody has touched in a year — and pruning is nobody's job." ^pain A collective maintenance pain. More than half of enterprise content is duplicate files, old project folders, abandoned drafts. Search signal-to-noise collapses; people stop trusting the results. The cost is invisible: the clutter is by definition rarely accessed, so the pain only surfaces when someone tries to find something and cannot. ## Discovery questions - "If I gave you a button that deleted every file in your shared drives older than three years and never opened since, what would you actually lose?" - "What share of your storage budget goes to content nobody has touched in a year?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - UK National Archives case study on a local authority's digital records: majority of shared-drive content was redundant or trivial and required large-scale ROT remediation.[^1] - Logikcull on e-discovery cost: reviewing 1 GB of data can cost thousands of dollars; ROT documents significantly increase discovery costs.[^2] - IBM on dark data: large portions of stored enterprise content are never analysed yet must still be governed, driving up storage and compliance costs.[^3] [^1]: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/retention-and-rot-case-study.pdf [^2]: https://www.logikcull.com/blog/ediscovery-opportunity-costs-infographic [^3]: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/dark-data