My volunteer fire department switched records systems, 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. Talking with the chief about an upcoming state report, someone asked whether anyone had pulled the data first. Nobody had. Twenty-five years of call records sat in a system the department no longer paid for, with thirty days left before access ended.
Those records are working documents. State reporting draws on call history, insurers ask about responses years later, and for a volunteer company the run log is proof of its own work. They also hold personnel attendance, investigation details, and patient and firefighter information, so where they end up matters as much as getting them out.
The vendor only had to offer an export, and the export was a SQL backup on an FTP server. I downloaded it, restored it to a local SQL Server instance and joined the tables back into something a person would recognize. By that afternoon I had four files, one per record type, with one far larger than the rest.
The state wanted the report in a spreadsheet and the chief had to be able to open the files himself, so CSV was the only format that worked at both ends. Administrators up to the district president needed copies of their own, so the files went out on five thumb drives and onto the chief's computer. The report went in on time, and the new chief still pulls from those files.