The idea of migration by emulation assumes the injection of digital objects into their native environments where they can be migrated using environment- and object native applications and the extraction of the resulting migrated objects from the corresponding environments after the process is finished.

The injection/extraction requires the usage of containers (like floppy devices), which could transport digital objects to/from the emulated environments. Currently the floppyImageHelper service within Planets provides with the ability of creating  containers in form of floppy image files.

However, in cases when the size of digital objects exceeds the size of standard floppy disks the injection/extraction of the data using them becomes a problem. Even in cases when the objects do not exceed standard floppy disk size the injection/extraction of big amounts of such objects in one turn (i.e. case of unattended large-scale migrations) becomes impossible. In order to overcome this problem the ability of creating containers of arbitrary size should be provided.

Currently we are working on the migrate implementing service, which has a similar mechanism as floppyImageHelper but instead creates HDD image files. Its responsibilities are:

• creating hdd images of a desired capacity and filesystem
• injecting digital objects into the existing hdd image file
• extracting digital objects from the existing hdd image file