Sometimes former data states are needed, i. e. data effective of last month end, last year, or the status before a major change, etc. The problem with this is that the current DDL doesn’t fit any more to the former objects. DB2 does not keep track of the changes of the data definitions. Elaborate adjustment work is required to create the matching object definitions in a separate subsys to enable restore from old imagecopies. Helpful is a copy tool that registers the object definition (DDL) whenever imagecopies are made or that takes periodically snapshots of both data and definitions. Thereby it is able to restore databases later to arbitrary subsystems. Better yet, if the tool can bridge DB2 versions.