About

We get data out of software the world moved on from.

DataMeans is a focused tool for one stubborn problem: decades of records trapped in databases and file formats that modern software simply won't open.

Old data doesn't have to mean lost data.

Somewhere on almost every organisation's network is a file nobody can open anymore. A customer list in FoxPro. A decade of invoices in Paradox. Inventory in a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet from a PC that's long gone. The data is fine. It's the software that disappeared.

The usual options are bad ones: track down ancient software that may not run on a modern machine, hire a specialist by the hour, or give up and re-key everything by hand. We built DataMeans so you don't have to do any of that.

Upload the file, and our conversion engines read the original structure, translate old encodings to UTF-8, and hand the records back as clean CSV, Excel, JSON or SQL, typically in under two minutes, with a report showing exactly what came across.

100+
files converted to modern formats
23
formats supported today
<2 min
typical processing time
256-bit
AES encryption at rest
What we stand for

Principles we don't bend on.

Fidelity, not guesswork

Every conversion comes with a report: each table, its record count, what we filtered and why, and every warning. Where a source file declares its own row count, we flag any table that doesn't match.

Privacy by default

Files are encrypted in transit and at rest, deleted automatically after your access window, and never sold, shared, or used to train anything.

Pay once, no lock-in

Simple per-job pricing with no subscription. Your exports are standard open formats you can take anywhere. We're a step, not a destination.

Built by data engineers

The hard formats (Btrieve, DataFlex, Pick, COBOL copybooks) are handled by purpose-built parsers, not brittle one-off scripts.

Get in touch

Have a format we don't list yet?

Tell us what you're sitting on. We add new systems all the time, and we're happy to take a look at an unusual file before you commit to anything.