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Maintenance – Other Maintenance – Archive Data

Over the years, businesses build up a lot of data. After a while, the amount of data can become unwieldy, out of date and irrelevant and can eventually affect the performance of the network.

The Archive Data utility allows users to elect to archive such things as Sales History, Item Movement, Transfer History, Creditors History, Purchase History, Works Orders, etc. Archiving can be carried out as a manual or as a scheduled task (normally run monthly). The archive process allows you to nominate the type of archive to be carried out, ranges of data and dates.

The effect of archiving data is to free up hard disk space or improve efficiencies in data lookup.

It should be remembered that running the archive will not automatically shrink the size of the relevant data files; the file size will not change until a reindex is run after the archive is complete. Where a reindex is not run, Micronet uses the empty space in the data file to store new data before it will increase the size of the file.

 

Best Practice

Prior to running any data archives, it is strongly recommended that you do a system backup. You should also you check that all users are logged out of Micronet.

Consideration should be given to how long an archive is going to take to run. Selecting to remove three or four years’ data will take a long time. It may impact on users, backups, scheduled tasks, etc. Archiving data requires planning. It is better to archive data in small pieces (say three to six months at a time) on consecutive nights or weekends, rather than to attempt to run it in one session.

To archive data manually:

  1. Select MAINTENANCE | OTHER MAINTENANCE | ARCHIVE DATA.

Micronet displays the Archive Records screen.

  1. Complete the following fields:

 

Field

Value

 

How to Purge

Select how you want the records purged. The options are:

  • By Date - deletes records prior to the date entered in the Purge items prior to field
  • By Days - deletes records older than the number of days entered in the How many days to keep field. This option is typically used for automated archives.

 

Purge items prior to

If you selected By Date in the How to Purge field, enter a date. All records prior to and including this date will be removed.

 

How many days to keep

If you selected By Days in the How to Purge field, enter the number of days you want to keep history for.

 

Store Deleted Records To File

Select whether the archived data can be reimported to Micronet. Options are:

  • Yes – allows you to nominate a file name and location for the deleted data to be stored. Deleted records within Micronet are kept but flagged as DELETED and then ignored by Micronet whenever file searches and reports are done. However, this data can be reimported into your live application if required.
  • No – results in the data not being able to be reimported into your live system. The only way to recall it will be to restore a backup of your system taken prior to the archive. Only select No if you are certain that you don't want Micronet to archive those records, but want them removed from your system altogether.

 

Filename to save as

If you selected Yes in the previous field, enter the file name where the archived data will be stored.
  1. Select PURGE and then one of the following menu options depending on the data you want to purge: