ChannelArchiver Overview

The ChannelArchiver is an archiving system for EPICS. It is available for Win32 (Microsoft Windows 98, NT, 2000) as well as Linux and many other Unix platforms.


Initially, the collection of tools might seem overwhelming, but note that you only have to use those that you need. They are now described in the order of importance.

ArchiveEngine

The ArchiveEngine is the main component of the ChannelArchiver. Even if you are not using the ArchiveEngine itself but only interested in the collected data, you might still want to understand a little bit about how the ArchiveEngine operates in order to make best use of the data.
The ArchiveEngine is an EPICS ChannelAccess client. It can save any channel served by any ChannelAccess server. The most common ChannelAccess servers are EPICS IOCs (Input/Output controllers) running the EPICS database.
The ArchiveEngine saves the full information available via ChannelAccess: The value, time stamp and status as well as with control information like units, display and alarm limits, ...
The ArchiveEngine is configured with a text file that lists what channels to archive and how. It can scan the given channels periodically as well as archive them on change. The data is written to local disk files.
More on the ArchiveEngine...

Retrieval

 There are several options for data retrieval. To get to the archived data, you only have to use one of the following options. Depending on the case at hand, you might prefer one tool over the other or pick a different tool for different situations.
CGIExport
This seems to be the most popular option. CGIExport is a plugin for web servers. It is definetely not the easiest to setup, because you have to configure the security of your network and web server, install GNUplot and finally create and maintain web pages that use this tool.
But once this has been done by a suitable expert, users can access ChannelArchiver data with any web browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, ...) from any computer (Windows PC, Linux, Solaris, Macintosh, ...) on the local network or even the whole Internet. CGIExport allows you to browse archived channel names, view online plots, download spreadsheets of the selected data as well as Matlab files.
WinBrowser
This is a Win32 program that offers the same options as the CGIExport tool: View the data, export it in spreadsheet or Matlab files... In addition, it allows interactive browing (zooming, panning) and is usually faster than the CGIExport tool. On the flipside, it is only available for PCs.
xarr
xarr (by Chris Larrieu, JLab) is similar to the WinBrowser but for Unix platforms. It might not support all ChannelArchiver features because it was originally developed for a different type of archiver.
ArchiveExport
ArchiveExport is a simple command-line tool. It can create Spreadsheets, GNUPlot and Matlab data files. It does not have a graphical user interface, it cannot plot data itself. It can be a building block for shell scripts or if you only have telnet/ssh access to the archive files and want to look at the data.
Striptool
Also developed by Chris Larrieu (JLab), Striptool is well known in the EPICS community as a scope-like real-time ChannelAccess client. With help of a ChannelArchiver plugin you can use Striptool on a "life" channel and then scroll back-in-time to archived data.
casi: TCL, Python, Perl
The "Channel Archiver Scripting Interface" provides scripting languages with access to archive data. If you already know e.g. python, you'll understand what this allows you to do. If instead you are looking for a data analysis or plotting beyond what you get from the generic tools (WinBrowser, CGIExport, ...), learning Matlab might be a better option.
ArchiveManager
A command-line tool to maintain the archive files: View what's in the archive, copy a seleted time range of channels into a new archive, perform basic repairs. Somebody who needs to take care of archived data, perform backups and arrange the available disk space has to use this tool. It is not useful for data retrieval and most end users.
LibIO
All the ChannelArchiver tools are built on this C++ library. If you want to write C++ programs that access the raw data files, you have to understand this API.
ChannelArchiver Manual