If you backup all, you can sort later, and even eventually never. It costs 1 USD per month at Google Cloud to store 1TB of data.

At this price it's not worth sorting, when one single devops costs 100 USD+ per hour, not including the opportunity cost of not working on something more productive (and less boring for the developer).

Then X years after the company is acquired, or sufficient time has lapsed, you can delete / drop the data without sorting.

Regarding virtual machines, if it's VMDK for example, you can read the raw disks without booting it, and again, it's not worth taking a risk to lose data to potentially save 10 USD per month, which is similar to one developer taking one beer extra at a team event.