Correct way to archive tag history

Ignition
1

Hello forum,
I'm new to Ignition but the company I work for has been using it since 2014. Our tag historian database is around 140 GB and it's getting difficult to backup and manage. I see options in ignition to prune the database automatically, but I would like to find a way to archive the data that it prunes to some kind of historical/ancestral database for long-term storage in such a way that I could still run reports or look up the tag history against that database.

I haven't found much information about this process online, so I set up a test environment and used mysql commands to manually copy then drop each sqlt_data_1_$year_$month (up to 2020) from the test database to the "historical" db. In our vision charts, I can see the old data has disappeared from the default tag provider tags, but I'm not able to associate those tags with the data in the new database so I suspect this is not the proper way to accomplish this 'offloading' process.

Does anyone have advice on the proper way to archive historical tag data in a way that keeps it accessible for Ignition?

Kind regards,

2

You cannot. Once the tag historian tables are unreachable in the database connection, you cannot query them with built-in tools.

Consider using database-specific tools to transform partitions into compressed, read-only backing stores that still present the data in query-able form.

There's no simple answer.

I would say that 140GB is a pretty small database for 10 years. Disk space is cheap. (I've worked on applications that would hit that quantity in a few weeks.)

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