Oh it’s definitely an easy to read DB. But that’s still beyond the point IMHO.

If you can’t reconstruct the state of your files without 3rd party software to interpret them, then they are not in an archive format.

One should be able to browse their data using OS native tools on an offline device push comes to shove.

I mean at this point you’re just being intentionally obtuse no? You are correct of course, volatile memory if you consider it from a system point of view would be pretty asinine to try and store.

However, we’re not really looking at this from a system’s view are we? Clearly you ignored all the other examples I provided just to latch on to the memory argument. There are many other ways that this data could be stored in a transient fashion.

I mean, it’s more complicated than that.

Of course, data is persisted somewhere, in a transient fashion, for the purpose of computation. Especially when using event based or asynchronous architectures.

And then promptly deleted or otherwise garbage collected in some manner (either actively or passively, usually passively). It could be in transitory memory, or it could be on high speed SSDs during any number of steps.

It’s also extremely common for data storage to happen on a caching layer level and not violate requirements that data not be retained since those caches are transitive. Let’s not mention the reduced rate “bulk” non-syncronous APIs, Which will use idle, cheap, computational power to do work in a non-guaranteed amount of time. Which require some level of storage until the data can be processed.

A court order forcing them to start storing this data is a problem. It doesn’t mean they already had it stored in an archival format somewhere, it means they now have to store it somewhere for long term retention.