Configure Data Archives

About Data Archives

Historian archives are stored data files, each of which contains data gathered from all data sources during a specific period of time. There are two types of archive files in an Historian archives directory:
  • Machinename_Config.ihc – the single .IHC file contains information about the archiver, tag configuration, and collector configuration.
  • Machinename_ArchiveXXX.iha – archive data files where x is a number indicating the place of the file in a time-based sequence.
Since archived data files can be quite large, adjust system parameters carefully so that you limit data collection to meaningful data only and so that you minimize the required size of system storage. This chapter describes techniques you can use in your application to accomplish these goals.
Note: You must have a minimum of 10 GB free space available for the Data Archiver to start.
Historian now supports a maximum archive size of 256 GB per archive. When you start Historian, it may take a longer time to start an archiver depending on the number of archives online, number of tags, and number of connections.
Note: The limit for the number of LUNs is 100.

Archive Creation

Archive files are created to store data as the Historian server receives it until they reach their duration limit. When the limit is reached, a new archive is created and the data is loaded into that archive. These archives can be created based on number of days or hours. You can observe the archives on the left side of the Data Store page, under Archives, with the name of the archive and start time for each archive
Note: As of Historian 7.0, Historian archives are time-based only. Historian will asynchronously create a new empty archive when data starts loading into an existing archive. If the option to automatically create archives is not enabled, however, you must open a new archive manually.
To create archives based on days:
  1. Open the Data Stores page and then select Edit. The Archive Configuration page appears.
  2. Select Configuration.
  3. In the Archive Duration field, select the Days option from the drop-down list.
  4. Enter the number of days for which you want to create archives.
  5. Select Update.
Setting Days to 1 means that a new archive will be created every day starting from the time your first archive is created. The next archive is created after one day (24 hours) from the time the first archive was created.
To create archives based on hours:
  1. Open the Data Stores page, and then select Edit. The Archive Configuration page appears.
  2. Select Configuration.
  3. In the Archive Duration field, select the Hours option from the drop-down list.
  4. Enter the number of hours for which you want to create archives.
  5. Select Update.
Setting Hours to 1 means that a new archive will be created after every hour starting from the time your first archive has been created.