Preserving existing information

You might want to preserve existing information in some form. This is particularly true for text fields such as Description, Notes®, and Headline that contain text entered in a language that uses non-ASCII characters.

Mapping and converting those characters risks creating an entry that is incomprehensible to users, with no possibility to go back and reconstruct the original entry.

One approach to this problem is to archive a copy of the original database and provide a means to retrieve the original entries from the archive.

Another approach is to save a field into a text document and attach this document to the record. The attachments are stored as BLOBs (Binary Large Objects), which can contain any type of data.