IIRC, the commitment from Oracle is that Export/Import should work for all databases at or above v5, and going forward into perpetuity. For that reason, several companies I have worked for have taken monthly, or annual, full database exports and put them on read-only media. HTH, Bambi. -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Uwe Küchler Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 3:25 PM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Long-Term Archiving Hello fellowship of the Oracle, due to not so recent changes in European and German law, many companies, particularly in the financial sector, have the need to archive critical data over a long period, like 6 to 10 years. BUT - simply using RMan or Export doesn't always suit the requirement to be able to restore data after several years. Just think about an RMan Backup of a 9i DB that you need to restore in 10 years - we're probably at Oracle 16 or whatever, then and you probably won't be able to restore your old data to this new version. Keeping a copy of the old Oracle binaries is not the best option, either; maybe you won't have the appropriate OS version or hardware handy, then. So I'd like to ask the community what kind of solutions you recommend to your customers / managers, when they ask you: "How can we retrieve our data after 10 years if there is a tax audit?" I've heard, but haven't found a reliable pointer yet, that Oracle will support backward compatibility of the export dump format throughout the next versions. In this case, a regular snapshot of data by exporting it might be an idea. What are your thoughts on that? Best regards from Germany, Uwe -- http://oraculix.wordpress.com/ -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l