Since archived data may sometimes have to be retained for a fairly long time, it may be useful to store information about the data together with the save data. During archival, a brief descriptive text may be entered (DESCRIPTOR operand) as well as a more extensive comment (USER-INFORMATION operand), describing the save version and containing information about the archived files, respectively.
Both texts can be output by means of SHOW-ARCHIVE. With save files on magnetic tape cartridge, this extension also affects the MAREN catalog, and with save files on disk it also affects the catalog entry.
Additional information can be modified at a later date, using:
//MODIFY-ARCHIVE ...,SAVE-VERSIONS=*MODIFY-USER-RECORD(...)
The date of the original backup remains unchanged if a save file is copied. This original save date can thus be used to select a save version in the COPY-SAVE-FILE and RESTORE-SAVE-FILE statements.