What is the process of archiving, and how does it work?



Question

What is archiving and how does it work?

Answer

Archiving is a way to keep your database from increasing in size and consuming too many resources on the database server.

Every event, alarm acknowledgment, user transaction, and video event are stored in tables within the database. When an archive is performed these events and transactions are exported out of the database and written to a text file allowing the database to be reduced in size.

We recommend only archiving up to 1 million events at a time due to the potential of text files becoming corrupt if they are too large.

When it comes time to restore archived events the system will read the text file and copy the data back into a temporary table in the database. Reports can then be run against the data from System Administration or the data itself can be viewed with other tools.

Once the user is done running reports or viewing the restored data they can purge the data which removes all of the events from the temporary database table and keeps the database from getting too large.

Note: OnGuard version 7.0 introduced the ability to archive to an archival database instead of text file if so desired.

Applies To

OnGuard (All versions)

Additional Information

For more details on the process of archiving, refer to the System Administration User Guide, Chapter 23, "Archives Folder".