Is your sermon archive actually safe?

This one is worth doing today rather than reading and meaning to, because the answer does not get better with time and nobody is going to tell you.

What we found on a real church archive

We opened one properly in September: a church with 1,374 unique messages going back to 2011, hosted the whole time by a well-known church software vendor they were paying every month.

1,089 came back. 375 had no audio left in the system at all. Not corrupted, not slow, not behind a login. The storage folder was empty. The losses ran at almost exactly a third of every year from 2011 through 2017, then stopped dead in 2018, which is the shape of a failed migration rather than gradual decay.

Nobody had told the church. The list still showed all 1,374 sermons, with a play button on every one.

How to check yours

1. Open your sermon list and go to the oldest year that has anything in it
2. Try to actually play three sermons, from the beginning, for ten seconds each
3. Do the same for a year in the middle, and for last year
4. Try downloading one from each of those years, not just playing it
5. If any of them fail, do not assume it is your connection. Try a second one from the same year

Play buttons lie. A list entry exists because a database row exists, and the row knows nothing about whether the file behind it is still there.

If something is missing

Ask your host directly and in writing, naming specific sermons and dates. Vague questions get vague answers. A specific one gets escalated.

Then look for the other copies, because there usually are some: an old laptop belonging to whoever ran sound, a podcast feed nobody remembers setting up, a YouTube channel that starts later than the archive does, DVDs or CDs in a cupboard. We have recovered real sermons from every one of those.

What to do once you know

Get a copy you control. Whatever else you decide, a folder of files on a drive your church owns is worth more than the best hosting plan, because it is the only version nobody can retire, reprice or migrate badly.

Then, if it matters to you that the archive is findable rather than merely stored, that is a separate job and a bigger one. But storage first. You cannot index something that is gone.