6.8.2 Old claims may not be registered on Defcare

In some cases, the employee may be very confident of their previous dealings with RCG and may even be able to produce copies of earlier correspondence. Even so, in some of these oldest cases, the identification and recovery of the original files may involve some difficulty. All since 1949. Defcare commenced operation in August 1998, when it absorbed data from a number of older stand-alone electronic systems from around Australia. The age of data transferred from those legacy systems varied widely but few of those old computer records were older than 1993. Thus, records of the oldest files still reside on Depar — tment of Defence card indexes and other manual systems. These manual systems have never been (and probably never will be) consolidated by Defence into a central index. Furthermore, Defence's former registry procedures varied widely from state to state and storage of the files themselves has never been consolidated, i.e. some old files are stored in Commonwealth Archives and some in Defence repositories. Given the highly mobile nature of service in the ADF, a claim may have been registered in any State in w — h — ich the claimant served or resided since discharge, and an old claim file could be located in the holdings of almost any of the Defence Locations.