By Sebastien Krajka

A few years ago, back in the region where I grew up (North of France, if you really want to know), I had a long conversation with an old local business owner I’ve known since childhood.

His company was founded by his great-grandfather, then passed down to his grandfather, his father, and eventually to him. What started as a small, local workshop had quietly become an international business, exporting its expertise far beyond the borders of our place.

At the edge of retirement, he was not thinking at all about quarterly growth or exit strategies. He was talking about passing the company on to his two sons. Not just the shares or the buildings, but the story, the values, the mistakes, the hard years, and the decisions that shaped everything.

At some point, he said something very similar to this: “If we lose our history, we lose the reason this company exists.”

That sentence never left me.

Most modern companies are not built with centuries in mind. Yet the ones that endure --- the ones we trust instinctively --- are almost always those that carry a visible, preserved legacy. This is where business legacy stops being a romantic idea and becomes a strategic responsibility.

What constitutes a corporate business legacy archive

When people hear “legacy,” they often think of a few framed photos or a bunch of corporate videos, filmed some time in the past…

In reality, a true business legacy archive is much broader --- and much more fragile.

A corporate legacy archive typically includes:

• Founding documents, statutes, early contracts
• Strategic decisions, pivots, crises, and recoveries
• Product and service evolution
• Brand identity, campaigns, and messaging
• Internal culture, leadership voices, and values
• Intellectual context: why decisions were made, not just what was done

What matters most is not only the format, but the context. A document without explanation loses meaning over time. A story without proof becomes folklore. A legacy archive must preserve both.

Common approaches to preserving business legacy

Over the years, I’ve seen companies choose very different paths when it comes to preserving their history:

• In-house archives: Often stored in basements, offices, or internal servers. They offer control, but remain highly vulnerable to reorganisation, budget cuts, disasters, and staff turnover.

• Museums and public institutions: They provide visibility and prestige, but rarely guarantee full preservation of all corporate knowledge --- especially sensitive or operational material.
• Digital-only preservation: Cloud storage, backups, and internal knowledge bases feel modern and efficient. Yet they rely entirely on technologies, formats, and organisations that may not exist in a few decades --- let alone centuries.

Each approach solves part of the problem. None truly answers the question of very long-term survival.

When legacy, durability, and trust converge

This is where business legacy preservation becomes something else entirely: a long-term commitment that goes beyond branding or compliance.

To be meaningful across centuries, preservation must:

• Survive technological obsolescence
• Resist political and environmental instability
• Maintain authenticity and integrity over time
• Remain accessible to future generations who may not share our tools, languages, or systems

Some companies have already taken this step:

Jaguar, for example, became the first UK motor manufacturer to preserve its corporate history within the Arctic World Archive, choosing durability over convenience and centuries over decades.

Soon, Guinness, a brand whose history is deeply intertwined with cultural and social heritage, will follow the same path, with preservation scheduled for February 2026.

These decisions are not symbolic gestures. They are signals. Signals that business legacy is not about the past --- it is about responsibility toward the future.

This is precisely the philosophy behind Arctic World Archive: preserving knowledge, identity, and history in conditions designed to last when everything else fails.

That old business owner from my childhood didn’t talk about legacy because it sounded impressive. He talked about it because he felt accountable --- to those before him, and to those who would come after.

Every company, whether family-owned or multinational, makes a choice. Either its history slowly dissolves into obsolete systems and forgotten files --- or it is deliberately preserved as something worth carrying forward.

Business legacy is not an archive problem. It is a leadership decision.