Develop a Maintenance Plan

The primary goal of a maintenance plan is to maintain integrity of the data collected. If you are successful in this regard, you will always be able to recover from a service interruption and continue operations with minimal or no loss of data. Since you can never ensure 100% system uptime, you must frequently and regularly back up current data and configuration files, and maintain non-current archive files in a read-only state. It is recommended that you use the following guidelines for backup and routine maintenance.

Daily Maintenance

On a daily schedule, perform the following backup operations unless you use ihArchiveBackup.exe to back up archives automatically.
  1. Use the Historian Web Admin console to back up the current archive and most recent .IHA archived data file. This preserves data collected up to this moment in time. You do not need to back up any read-only archive files after they have been backed up once.
  2. Use Windows Explorer to back up the .IHC file if it has been modified by anyone (unless it is backed up automatically). This file contains all current configuration information (tag configuration, archive configuration, and collector configuration). Using this file, you can restore the system configuration after an unplanned shutdown.