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What happens to a company's data when it goes insolvent?

· 4 min read

When a company goes into insolvency, everyone's attention is on property, debts and creditors' claims. Years of working records rarely make it onto the list: the code, the tickets, the project history, the team's conversations. In most cases they are not sold, archived or even consciously deleted. They simply disappear when the subscriptions stop being paid.

What a typical company leaves behind

A company that has worked for five or ten years usually has far more data than anyone realises:

Almost none of this sits on the company's own servers any more. It lives in cloud services that are paid monthly, often with a company card.

What usually happens to it

Once a company stops paying, the services do what their terms say. Accounts are first restricted, then suspended, and after a grace period the data is deleted for good. Many providers delete it 30–90 days after payments stop; some do it sooner. Laptops are wiped and sold, servers are switched off and the domain name expires.

Nobody decides to destroy the archive. It happens by default, often before anyone has looked at what was there.

What has to be kept

Some records must be preserved. Accounting documents and other records required by law have to be kept for the period the law sets, and the administrator takes over the company's documents as part of the procedure.

These duties mostly cover the financial side, though. The working archive (code, tickets, support cases, chat) is usually not something the law requires anyone to keep, so it is the first thing to go.

Why that is a loss for creditors

That working archive now has a new kind of value. AI companies are teaching their systems to do real work: write and fix software, answer customers, plan projects. To do that well, they need examples of how real teams actually worked, and such examples are hard to find on the public internet.

A well-kept archive from an established company can be licensed as AI training data. The money goes into the insolvency estate like the proceeds of any other asset, and from there to the creditors.

Personal data: why it cannot simply be sold

These archives are full of personal data: names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, sometimes HR or health information. Under the GDPR they cannot just be handed over to a buyer.

The safe way is to remove personal data before anyone outside sees it. In practice that means:

What an administrator can do in the first weeks

If the archive is to keep any value, the first weeks matter most. A short checklist:

  1. List the systems. Ask the former management or IT staff which tools the company used and who holds the admin accounts.
  2. Secure admin access. Make sure someone can still log in, including the phone or app used for two-step login.
  3. Note the deadlines. Check when each subscription was last paid and when the provider will delete the data.
  4. Don't wipe devices yet. Before laptops and servers are cleaned and sold, check whether they hold the only copy of anything.
  5. Ask for a valuation. A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether the data is of interest, before any money is spent.

How Datobex helps

Datobex does this work together with insolvency administrators and liquidators. We check whether the data has value, copy it securely within the EU, anonymise it and license it to vetted AI companies. The estate receives 70% of the sale price and pays nothing at any stage. If there is no sale, there is no cost.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

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