Any way to persistently lock messages?

[David Epstein]

I am wondering if any other users have faced or solved this problem:

I have over the years constantly revised some basic tools I use to create and edit stacks where I store substantive information of various kinds (tables, images, text).  The scripts of those substantive stacks send messages to be handled by my “tool” stack; but as a result of later revisions of my tool stack some of those handlers have disappeared.  So if I simply want to inspect old substantive stacks I am stymied by error messages.

One solution would be an ability to lock messages persistently, but I do not see a way to do this.  I can imagine a workaround that would lock messages, then copy the content but not the scripts of the objects in my substantive stack to some new stack  where I could study them.

But I wonder if someone has already done this or has a different idea.

Many thanks.

David Epstein