Emulation
A digital preservation strategy that keeps original files unchanged and instead recreates the software/hardware environment needed to use them, so records behave as they originally did.
Emulation is a digital preservation strategy that preserves the original files unchanged and instead recreates the environment — old software, and via emulators old operating systems on current hardware — needed to render and use them. The record behaves as it originally did, rather than being converted.
Emulation’s strength is fidelity: it preserves the original object exactly, including complex behavior, interactivity, and look-and-feel that conversion might lose, and it avoids the cumulative-loss risk of repeated migration. Its drawback is complexity — emulators and old software must be maintained or recreated, with technical and sometimes legal hurdles. For that reason emulation is often reserved for complex or interactive material (software, databases, multimedia) while migration handles ordinary documents and images. The two are complementary approaches to the same problem: keeping digital records usable as technology ages.