Life and death of a data set: a forensic investigation

I recently reflected that life can be extremely unFAIR, especially if you are a spectrum. I had looked down on the body of this dead spectrometer and reflected how many keen enthusiastic young researchers had tussled with the complexities of what had once been a state-of-the-art scientific wonder which was now reduced to a problem of recycling, disposal and potential contamination risk. How many now established scientists had benefitted from the children of this spectrometer, the excellent spectroscopic data sets that it was capable of generating in its heyday. They had crafted from these data sets—sometimes with a little help from their supervisors (and no doubt sometimes subtle data processing), their theses and early publications—the passports to their now established careers. But where is all that data now?