James Trudeau writes: So amongst all the other pains of transitioning from a 3000 to a 9000 :-(( I keep having cows about what to do with the 9 years of offsite archive data we've got to deal with. It's all on DDSII tapes in MPE STORE format. It consists of TurboImage databases COBOL source code and executables. Total of ummm 550-600GB. If I can get it into some kind of reportable format on the 9000 I can dispense with everything but the TurboImage data. Keeping the 3000 after migration and loading up the tapes one at a time and going through the same process we use for the current data is not an option. The stuff does not have to be online, it just needs to be more or less readily accessable. It's the freakin' auditors ya know. [clh:] I'm not sure how you handle "versions" of your DB. By this I mean if you make a change to a Dataset (add a field, eg), you must change the program(s) that access that dataset. If you have 9+ years of archived data, can the "current version" of the program use the 9 year old data? Do you have the 9 year old program? Examining this issue may result in a reduction of the amount of data it you need to retain... Moving on: you state that you've already eliminated the need to maintain the migrated source and executables, which makes perfect sense. The problem, then, is that you would like to access TurboImage data from an MPE STORE tape. Even if you could somehow "read" the tape from a different OS, you would still have to emulate the Image Intrinsics on that different OS to actually read the data! You say you don't need the data; your requirement seems to be "keep the auditors happy". Perhaps you could make some arrangement with a solution provider in your area -- either someone in the channel, or someone in the "business continuation/disaster recovery" arena -- to provide a box on a contingency basis... Carl Hughes