# Correct way to archive tag history

**URL:** <https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/correct-way-to-archive-tag-history/86194>\
**Category:** Ignition\
**Tags:** vision\
**Created:** [February 22, 2024, 3:58pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/correct-way-to-archive-tag-history/86194 "2024-02-22T15:58:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Marcus\_Davenport](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/838e76/32.png) [@Marcus\_Davenport](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/Marcus_Davenport)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2024, 3:58pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/correct-way-to-archive-tag-history/86194/1 "2024-02-22T15:58:01Z")

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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,

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![pturmel](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/pturmel/32/3295_2.png) [@pturmel](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/pturmel)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2024, 4:04pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/correct-way-to-archive-tag-history/86194/2 "2024-02-22T16:04:22Z")

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> [@Marcus\_Davenport](#):
>
> still run reports or look up the tag history against that database.

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.)