Why do I need snapshots?

A snapshot is a copy of data from the database created by running an ILM enhanced archiving object (for transactional data) or by running the CDE (for context data). If an archiving object is run in snapshot mode, no archivability checks take place. Also the data is not deleted from the database as in regular data archiving. Snapshots are typically used during system decommissioning to extract data from still open business processes from the system to be decommissioned.