Tip of the Day 120: How to Handle All That Data

As many of you know the eDART saves the detailed cycle curve data as well as the summary values for each shot. The cycle curve data takes up a lot of room on the eDART‘s and eDART Data Manager’s (EDM’s) disks relative to the summary data. With many eDARTs attached to an EDM (or server) all copying their data up daily this can create a huge pile.

As long as the eDART or EDM’s hard drives do not fill up all the data is saved. However you can loose old data from either when the hard drive gets close to full. Both the eDART and EDM have a rollover mechanism that uses a high-water mark on cycle and summary data as a percentage of the disk. This system attempts to preserve summary data as long as possible by removing cycle data first.

Nevertheless, eventually the old summary data will be removed to make room for the new. When that happens all record of the parts is lost. If you are serious about saving data for tracking purposes here are a few techniques from which to choose to ensure it never is lost.

• • Use commercial archiving programs to burn DVD’s of the oldest data (cycle and summary) on a regular basis (before the rollover removes it).

• • Periodically remove old cycle data from the EDM in favor of keeping the summary data. This can be done by using the Windows “Search” feature on the EDM’s “ftp” directory. In the search box put ”  *.cycle.ph2 ” to search for all cycle data files. Then click the “Modified” heading (once or twice) to sort by date. Select the oldest cycle files and delete them.

    You may have specific molds for which you want to keep cycle data. In that case, sort by the “In Folder” column and, by holding the CTL key, un-select files for those molds before deleting.

• • Set up the eDART to copy only cycle data to the EDM that has notes associated with it. Thus if something odd was going on and someone left a note there would always be cycle data there to go with it.

• • Set up the eDART to send only summary data to the EDM or server. This is obviously the most severe method and the analyzer will never be able to show cycle data this way. But summary data contains most of the information required for analysis of long term trends and is therefore still useful.

RJG Customer Support can help you set up the switches for the last two methods above.