My volunteer fire department switched records systems a while back, and the move covered everything except the old records. The new system went in, the crews trained on it, runs started landing in it the same week, and the old subscription was cancelled. I was talking with the chief at the time about an upcoming state report when it surfaced: did anyone grab the data? Nobody had. Twenty-some years of call records were sitting in a system the department no longer paid for, behind retrieval instructions nobody at the station could make sense of, with a thirty-day window to act.

A fire department's records are working documents. Call history feeds state reporting, insurers ask about responses years after the fact, and for a volunteer company the run log is the proof of its own work.

I asked to be put in touch with the old vendor and wrote them a polite note. What came back was an anticlimax: an FTP address with a SQL backup waiting on it. The instructions were only complicated if a database dump is a brick to you, and to almost everyone it is a brick. To get it usable I pulled the file down over FTP, stood up SQL Server, restored the backup, and the records were queryable again: every call in the system. The rest was translation, joining tables back into things a person recognizes, then a bulk export to CSV, one file per record type, into the department's own storage.

The state report went in on time, and the new chief pulls from those files still.