I once worked for an organization that had grown very quickly. By the time I worked there, all our personnel and finance records were in your usual corporate systems with backups, etc.

But if you wanted anything from more than 4 or 5 years back, you had to go down to the basement and boot up the founder's circa 2000 iBook to get the info out of an Access database she'd built back in the day. Apparently the people who deployed the new systems elected to not do any data conversion from that (literally) home baked solution.

So, it was possible to get old data. Just not at all easy or convenient.