Sounds like these 80 year olds need some friendly data hoarders to help them to digitise their collections. (Or for the BBC to promise to return the film, undamaged, once they’ve digitised them.)
We had a “kids tape” that had countless things recorded over each other. The second half was just a collage of the tail end of various cartoons and shows. When it got to the Abba-soundtracked documentary about a carnival it meant you were at the end of the tape.
Why would the BBC want old film, once they had the footage? They’ve already thrown them away once! It’s only of value to collectors at this point, and the Beeb can’t sell it if they’re claiming it’s lost.
Fair enough; I didn’t consider artifacts like logs and traces. I suppose a stale marker might prompt the original reporter to retest and supply fresh ones (or confirm it’s fixed in the dependency case).
In an ideal world I suppose we’d have automated tests for all bug reports but that’s obviously never going to happen!
Self-hosting email is not at all easy, and I’d recommend paying for hosted email from a service that lets you use a custom domain. Most will let you have multiple inboxes, although this may cost extra.
Then, just buy a domain (NameCheap is fine) and point your MX records at the email provider.