Additional information

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.

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.