Archiving

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The MainBoss archiving facilities let you store records that no longer need to be kept on-line. The facilities also let you recall records that have been removed from the main system, so that you can examine old data and produce reports on that data (if necessary).

Warning: Archiving removes records from the main system permanently. They cannot be put back into your main database.

Archived information is stored on your hard drive in compressed format. This reduces the disk space required to store the records. Another benefit of archiving will be improved performance. Archiving removes work orders, purchase orders, and inventory history records from your everyday database, saving them in separate files. This means that your everyday database becomes smaller, which may speed up MainBoss operations significantly.

Each time you archive, a new set of compressed data is stored in a separate archiving directory. This is called an archive set. MainBoss lets you name each set of archived data so that any time you need to retrieve a specific set of historical work orders for reports and analysis they can be quickly restored from the compressed format. If you archived quarterly and you wanted to reconstruct an entire year of work history you would restore each quarter, one after the other.

You must deal with each archive set individually—you cannot merge them together. For example, suppose that each quarter you archive any records that are more than a year old. You cannot combine the archives of four quarters into information for a whole year. If you wanted reports on your archived information, you could produce quarterly reports, but could not combine the data to get a single yearly report. You also cannot change the contents of archive sets; once information has been archived, it cannot be edited.

When you restore an archive set, MainBoss creates a number of working files containing uncompressed data from the archive set. These working files are only necessary as long as you want to work with the old archived data. Since the working files take up extra disk space, you should clear them once you are finished looking at the old data; clearing the files frees up the disk space.

Clearing these working files does not affect the compressed archive sets. Therefore, if you ever want to look at old data again, you can just restore the same archive set. This creates new working files that can be examined as necessary.

Note: Before you begin any archiving operation, saving or restoring, we recommend that you back up your MainBoss database. This ensures that your data remains safe if MainBoss fails because of a power outage or some other system failure. For more about backing up your database, see Backing Up Your MainBoss Database.