A Download Is Not a Departure
Article by Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
A service offers an export of everything you have stored. The resulting file is complete but difficult to read, and no obvious next step makes it useful elsewhere.
Technically, the information has been returned. Practically, the person may still depend on the place they were trying to leave.
Portability has more than one dimension. There are the records themselves, their organisation, the relationships between them, and the explanation needed to interpret unfamiliar fields. Losing that structure can turn a collection into a pile.
A useful export should make continued use reasonably possible. It should not require the departing person to reconstruct years of context from an unexplained file.
The test is simple to state even when difficult to achieve: after leaving, can someone still understand and use what was supposed to be theirs?