• How about telling them the guy who was keeping the records of the backup tapes left years ago, was never replaced, and you don’t have any idea how to find data for any particular date. My experience is that this is true in many organizations, so it’s a credible answer.

    Then offer to send them the 30,000 tapes that you have in off-site storage so they can look through them themselves. Make sure all the tapes are in obsolete physical formats with no existing working tape drives.

    That should keep they busy for a while. 🙂