Preservation of data is a legal issue as much as a technical one. The rules are established by the legal entity and then implemented via a technical solution. I had one client in Europe that was faced with the same situation. The country's government wanted to be able to rapidly review the system as it was when it was decommissioned. That was on 12/31/1999 midnight.
I took a tape snap shot of the data, converted all those tapes to AWS files and brought them up on TurboHercules. This met all the legal requirements and IBM's contractual requirements. So everyday they restore the image and re-IPL it as 12/31/1999 00:00:00 ... It is still running today ... Yes for archive and DR ANY mainframe can be used... even if it an emulator ... without violation of T/Cs from IBM As for preserving the DB2 data only ... A commodity version of DB2 on a PC with Linux or Windows has connection pieces that you should be able to EXPORT all the table and import to the PC. I did the reverse for another client... Took an PC OS2 version of data including text and photos, exported all and imported same into zOS DB2... and with minor changes to the configuration of the end user machine, no application code needed to be changed... although it was recompiled and rebound to mainframe DB2... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
