Back up Archives with Historian

Best practice is to back up your Historian archive files periodically to ensure your data is protected. Historian bundles alarms and events data with tag data in its backup files. Once an archive has been backed up, it can be stored to a shared network location, stored off-site, or written to physical media.

Important points to remember for backing up archives in Historian:

  • The .IHC file is automatically backed up when, and only when, you backup the current archive .IHA file. By default, the .IHC backup path is the same as the archives path.

  • The .IHC uses the following naming convention: ComputerName_Config-Backup.ihc. If the default backup path is different than the archives path, the .IHC file is copied to the backup folder with the standard .IHC naming convention: ComputerName_Config.ihc.

  • In the Mirroring system, the Client Manager sends a backup message to the Data archiver located on the Client Manager node to which the user is connected. The backup, then, happens in the specified location on that node. If that Data archiver is not running the user will get a NOT_CONNECTED error message and the backup will not happen.

  • If you back up an archive more than once, the backup tool will (by default) attempt to use the same name for the backup file and will detect that an archive with the same name already exists. Rename the backup archive file or move the original backup archive file from the target backup directory.

    For more information on archiving, refer to Backing up an Archive Manually.

Zipping backup files

By default, Historian 7.0 SP1 does NOT store backup files as ZIP files. If you want to store backup files as ZIP files, then you can manually configure registry keys to specify this.

CAUTION: When you enable the registry keys to store backups as ZIP files:
  • If you are collecting alarms, then your alarms may not be backed up.
  • You cannot export alarms to another Historian server.
  • Disaster recovery of data may be limited.

Backing up alarm data: When backing up your Historian archives, any alarms with a life cycle that overlaps the data archive being backed up will be included. This means that an alarm with a long life cycle can be included up in multiple backups. For example, say the following alarm and archive dates were the following:

Table 1. Sample Alarm Data
Alarm/Data Archive Start Time End Time
Alarm1 09/02/2004 09/06/2004
Archive1 09/01/2004 09/03/2004
Archive2 09/03/2004 09/04/2004
Archive3 09/04/2004 09/06/2004

If any or all of these archives are backed up, Alarm1 will go into the backup for each. When the archives are restored, Historian will analyze the included alarm data and, if already in the Historian archive, is intelligent enough to know it already has the alarm.