Unlocking Decades of Legacy Data Without Risky Migration
City Council Infrastructure Department
Implemented Mesh as an intelligent overlay to make decades of unstructured legacy data searchable and usable without costly migration, while preserving it for compliance and reference.
Project Outcome
Before
- Terabytes of unstructured legacy data effectively unusable
- No understanding of data value or relevance
- Search limited to filenames and folder structures
- Tribal knowledge required to find anything
- Legacy data rarely accessed or reused
- Risk of migrating low-value data to new systems
After
- All legacy data fully searchable by content and context
- AI-driven classification and metadata overlay
- Unified search across old and new systems
- Location-agnostic search with relevant results
- Data reuse enabled without migration
- Historical data preserved and accessible for compliance
Client Overview
The client was facing a familiar but critical problem: terabytes of legacy engineering and business data spread across network drives and NAS storage, accumulated over decades. Over time, these repositories had become completely unstructured and inconsistently named, poorly understood by the organisation, and dependent on tribal knowledge that no longer existed. While the data still needed to be retained for compliance, audit, and historical reference, there was no clear understanding of what data was still valuable, what was purely archival, or what was duplicated, obsolete, or irrelevant. At the same time, the organisation was implementing a new, modern data management system for all future work.
Existing Environment
- Terabytes of legacy data across network drives and NAS storage
- Completely unstructured and inconsistently named files
- Poorly understood data repositories with no documentation
- Dependent on tribal knowledge that no longer existed
- No clear understanding of data value or relevance
- New modern data management system being implemented for future work
This fragmentation created operational risk, slowed down engineering teams, and made controlled information management nearly impossible.
Project Objective
To modernize data management without blindly migrating decades of unknown, low-value data into a new system, while still making legacy data accessible, searchable, and valuable for ongoing operations.
Solution Overview
1. Mesh as an Intelligent Overlay
Rather than migrating legacy data, the client implemented Mesh as an intelligent overlay across their entire data landscape. Mesh was configured to index the new data management system for all current and future data, index existing network drives and NAS storage in place, extract and analyze content directly from files (not just filenames or folders), apply AI-driven classification and clustering across legacy data, and overlay company-standard metadata where patterns could be confidently identified. This approach allowed the organisation to treat all data as searchable and discoverable, regardless of where it physically lived.
2. Content-Based Search and Classification
Mesh transformed the legacy data from a 'dead archive' into usable data. All legacy data became fully indexable and searchable, users could search by content, context, and intent (not just filenames), related documents were automatically clustered together even across folders and drives, and AI classification added structure where none previously existed. Critically, the data never moved—only its accessibility and usability changed.
3. Unified Search Across Old and New Systems
One of the most powerful outcomes was location-agnostic search. Users can now perform a single search across the new data management system, legacy network drives, and NAS storage. They receive results based on relevance, not storage location, and are directed seamlessly to the correct system or repository. From a user perspective, the distinction between 'old' and 'new' systems disappeared.
Why This Case Study Is Important
This project demonstrates Tentech's unique capability to:
- Avoided multi-million dollar migration costs
- Made decades of 'dead' data valuable again
- Enabled modern search capabilities without disruption
- Preserved compliance and audit capabilities
- Provided foundation for future governance initiatives
- Demonstrated intelligent approach to legacy data challenges
It highlights Tentech's dual strength: deep consulting expertise and strong technical implementation capability, positioning us as one of Australia's leading Autodesk Vault specialists.
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