Every organization holds records it considers irreplaceable: research data, heritage collections, and operational archives that underpin compliance and institutional memory. Too often, these materials sit on shelves, in basements, on legacy tapes, assumed to be safe because nothing has gone wrong so far. But disasters do not send advance notice, and the record of what happens when they strike is sobering.

A catalog of warnings

On August 1, 1994, the UK’s Norwich Central Library was devastated by fire. In its basement, the Norfolk Record Office held a thousand years of documents. The strongroom’s fireproof doors held, but firefighting caused significant water damage. Records had to be rescued, frozen to prevent mold, and painstakingly conserved over the years, leading directly to the construction of a purpose-built Archive Centre in 2003.

Scotland’s Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Building suffered two fires in four years. The first, in 2014, destroyed the iconic Mackintosh Library, around 90 oil paintings, and nearly 100 pieces of original furniture. After the fire, detailed laser surveys and a crowdsourced photographic archive preserved a digital record of the interiors. That record became crucial when a second fire in 2018 gutted the building during restoration, leaving its cause officially “undetermined” because all physical evidence was destroyed.

In September 2018, fire destroyed an estimated 90% of the 20 million items held by Brazil’s National Museum, including irreplaceable recordings of extinct indigenous languages and the oldest human remains found in the Americas. The museum lacked a sprinkler system and had not received its full maintenance budget since 2014. By 2018, it was operating on a fraction of its required budget. Inspectors had warned of fire risk as early as 2004, but the necessary safety upgrades were never made. “It was a foretold tragedy,” one researcher said.

Not all disasters involve fire. In 2009, the Cologne City Archives (26 kilometers of records dating to 922 CE, including documents from Karl Marx, Heinrich Böll, and Konrad Adenauer), collapsed into a metro construction void, killing two people. Restoration is expected to take 30 years and cost €400 million.

In 1966, the tragic Arno flood in Florence resulted in dozens of fatalities and damaged 3 to 4 million historic books and manuscripts, as well as 14,000 works of art. This was a disaster that has been credited with founding the modern conservation profession, and restoration work continues decades later.

And since 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused verified damage to more than 500 cultural sites, including the looting of over half the Kherson state archive. Volunteers have backed up over 50 terabytes of Ukrainian cultural data. As one archivist in Lviv put it: “If they destroy the building, we can rebuild it. But if the archives are gone, we lose part of who we are.”

The pattern and the lesson

These examples span 60 years, six countries, and every type of disaster, from fire, flood, and structural collapse to armed conflict and chronic underfunding. The common thread is the assumption that physical storage equals safety. Paper in a strongroom, and tapes on a shelf are all better than nothing, but they represent a single point of failure.

What also stands out is how often, where they existed, digital records made the difference between total loss and recovery. In Glasgow, the digital surveys taken after the first fire became the primary record after the second. In Ukraine, volunteer-led digital preservation has safeguarded materials that were vulnerable to shelling in their physical form. Structured digital copies, stored independently of the originals, are not a luxury but an insurance policy.

What protection looks like in practice

At Ovation Data, we work with organizations that hold exactly this kind of irreplaceable material. What we repeatedly see is that disaster preparedness is not on the agenda until after something goes wrong. As our Executive Chairman, Gregory Servos, has said: “Without prioritizing data preservation, we risk a loss as profound as the destruction of the Library of Alexandria – valuable knowledge will be lost forever, setting back progress for generations. It’s unacceptable that 80% of historical data still sits on shelves, unused and forgotten.”

Sometimes, recovery is still possible even after disaster strikes. In the months after Hurricane Katrina, an Ovation client finally retrieved more than 100 open-reel tapes from their New Orleans office. The 21-track tapes, recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had been submerged in floodwater for weeks. Some were still sitting in water when they arrived at our facility. Even sealed cases had been breached as water and debris had made their way inside. We treated the recovery as a media hazmat event, isolating the tapes and undertaking a methodical three-stage process of bathing, baking, and cleaning each one. We recovered 100% of the data but not every organization will be that fortunate, and the lesson remains that the time to digitize and preserve is before disaster makes recovery impossible.

Protecting irreplaceable assets doesn’t always involve a massive transformation program. At Camden Place in Chislehurst (the final home of Napoleon III), we digitized a collection of fragile historical documents, from postcards to broadsheets, creating structured, searchable digital surrogates while the originals were stored in environmentally controlled conditions. As Angela Hatton of the Heritage Committee noted: “Digitizing our collection uncovered extraordinary documents we didn’t know we had, like Napoleon III’s funeral plans, filled with handwritten edits and forgotten details.”

For the Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia, we digitized approximately 1,800 pieces of legacy media, including oral histories of WWII prisoners of war, remastering the audio to remove background noise and embedding searchable metadata. Hundreds of veterans’ stories can now be clearly heard, shared, and preserved, without relying on physical tapes that will inevitably degrade.

Act before circumstances make it urgent

If your organization holds legacy records (paper, tape, film, microfilm, early digital media) the question is not whether a disaster could affect them, but whether you will be able to recover if and when it does. Start by knowing what you hold, then prioritize what is irreplaceable. Create structured digital copies and store them independently of the originals, and above all, do not wait for the perfect moment. Brazil’s National Museum was warned of its fire risk; Glasgow had fire-suppression components delivered but not yet installed. The gap between intention and action is where the loss occurs.

Ovation has spent 45 years preserving and protecting irreplaceable data across 275 formats, for over 2,500 clients worldwide, with 132.5 petabytes under management. When you work with us, your data stays yours, with no hidden fees or lock-ins. We operate from secure facilities in both the UK and the US, serving as a single, accountable partner across the full data lifecycle. If your organization holds records worth protecting, we’d welcome a conversation before circumstances make it urgent.

Get in touch: ovationdata.com/contact-us or solutions@ovationdata.com

Sources and further reading:

Norwich Central Library fire (1994): Norfolk Record Office blog

Glasgow School of Art fires (2014, 2018): GSA Archives; STV News; Art UK

Brazil National Museum fire (2018): Science; British Council; Wikipedia

Cologne City Archives collapse (2009): Wikipedia; British Library Endangered Archives

Florence flood (1966): Wikipedia; HISTORY

Ukraine cultural heritage (2022–present): UNESCO; Kyiv Post; Lviv Herald

Ovation Data: White paper; Camden Place; Andersonville