Section 5.3. Creating and
Registering Archives. When you create
archives you can name them using any naming standard
you want. Just, you know, we suggest you come up with some kind of a
site standard for that. It can be stored in any directory,
although, typically, people put them in the pidat directory.
And, we always suggest that you disable virus
scanning software from looking at those archive
directories. We have actually had customers who,
just because of the way the,
the archive is writing in a proprietary binary format,
we have actually seen people get false-positives of
viruses because of just the combination of
characters being written to disk. So you normally want us,
want to exclude that. It also will, of course,
slow your system down because we are constantly writing to those
archives. So, it's not a good idea. It's going to be
constantly thrashing, checking those archives for viruses.
So, creating
archives -- you can create these using the System Management Tools
as I am going to demonstrate in just a second. You would use this tool
right here to create a brand new archive.
So, let me go ahead and demonstrate.
I will go ahead and create a brand new archive.
This is my test server, currently
sorted by their archive number. And I will create a
brand new archive. And you have some
choices here. We have a choice of where we are going to put it, what we are going to
call it. As you can see we have consistently,
or we are, we are keeping consistent with the naming convention
that we started when we did the install. But there's no reason you cannot
change that. I am going to call this myarch1.dat. There's really
no reason you cannot change it at all. Now I would normally
choose Clone the Primary Archive
and at a fixed size. We will talk more about fixed vs,
vs the other types of archives.
But, the -- I, I
simply want something at the same size. But, if I wanted to, I could
create one larger. So, for example: 128 megabytes,
that's going to give me at least --
I would be able to create at least 64,000 tags. If
for whatever, some reason I needed to get bigger than that, I may go to
256 megabytes or something like that. I am just going to
clone this. And,
you do have the option to create an archive that
is, has a specific start and end time, and that can be either
fixed or dynamic. Now, the difference between
the two has to do with whether we can increase the size
as we fill it or not. And I will explain
more about dynamic archives a little bit latter. Typically, you would
always, always choose fixed archives
that, that are going to be using the current,
the current times. But, for backfilling purposes,
if you'd got data that needs to go into an older,
you know, an older time slot, you can actually create
these fixed or dynamic archives that have those old times
for recovery purposes. We actually
do not cover backfilling in this class. It's part of our System
Manager II class. And, I will go ahead
and hit OK. And,
now I have created that archive.
See, there's the new archive.
And, currently, it is registered.
I will go ahead and -- I will register it for me automatically. I will sort.
Now it is the highest empty archive.
And, as such, it's the destination of
the next shift. Take a look here, where we say Shift Prediction.
As you can see, this is now going to be the destination of the next shift,
this myarch1.dat.
Now it's only when an archive is registered that
PI really knows anything about that. And, you can register
and underre, unregister that archive from PI
SMT. We do not have to unregister -- excuse me, register
the archive that I just created because
when you create the archive from SMT, it's registered already.
If you notice, though, I can unregister it.
And it disappears. It's not in the list of
archives we know about. Now, when it's in that unregistered
state, at that point it's
belongs to you. You can do anything you want to it. You can move it around, you
can rename it, you can move it to a different location and then register it
in that new location. However, when it's registered,
it does belong to PI, so you should not do any of that moving
or renaming. So, I am going to go ahead and register this now.
This was called myarch1.dat.
And, now it
shows up again. I will go ahead and sequence this again. Zero through
three. And, here's
our archives. Now, in addition to
doing it from the System Management Tools,
you can also do it from the Command Prompt. So,
there's a Utility, piartool, dash,
for example, ar for archive register, au
for archive unregister, and if you
simply pass the name of the archive -- this was called
myarch1.dat, you will notice that is
going to unregister that archive. In fact,
over here, when I refresh this, my archive's
no longer registered. So, that, that
is a way to unregister, or you can register
this from the DOS prompt.
Not terribly useful except if you need to create a -- some kind of a
batch file to register hundreds of
archives at a time. That can be fairly useful.