What am I missing?

[Gordon-Loomberah]

I'm using VVP with Cumulus and Weatherlink running simultaneously, and in recent weeks have found that VVP seems to stop working occasionally, often in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason. In the morning I discover Cumulus flat-lined for everything since it stopped, and Weatherlink blank since it stopped. "Disconnect" then reconnect in VVP and download in Weatherlink and it is all there. Close Cumulus, edit Mar12log.txt and today.ini back to the stop time, in this case I went back to 11:59:00PM, but Cumulus only seems to download the past few minutes, leaving a large gap in my 1 minute interval log file.

When Cumulus starts, the downloading data progress bar doesn't do anything before it disappears, rather than the usual green that appears and moves along. I'm sure this is the exact procedure I have used previously and it was been successful.
I've tried a few times this morning now, and keep losing more data each time I try it ;( I've tried just doing the dis/reconnect in VVP, and also closing it and re-starting, but same result- more lost data.

Any suggestions as to what the problem might be, and how to get the missing data... preferably in the next half hour before 9am rollover would be great

[steve]

Did you set the 'rewind' time back to a timestamp that would actually exist in the logger? i.e for 23:59 you would have to have the logger set to 1-minute intervals. Odd things happen when the station is asked for timestamps that don't exist in its log, and I don't know what VVP does in such circumstances. The diags log would show what happened when Cumulus asked for the data.

[Gordon-Loomberah]

Yes I use 1 min logging, and I initially set the time stamp back to 23:59:00 PM, the 2nd time I tried it I set it to 11:59:00 PM, as I vaguely remembered that it didn't use 24 hour format last time I had to do this a week or so ago.

Diagnostics

cumulus (2).zip

[steve]

On the latest attempt, you were asking for data from the future:

5/03/2012 08:25:01.850 : VP2: Downloading history from 5/03/2012 11:59:00 PM
5/03/2012 08:25:01.850 : y=2012 m=3 d=5 h=23 m=59
5/03/2012 08:25:03.636 : VP2: DownloadData_V = -32701
5/03/2012 08:25:03.636 : VP2: GetNumberOfArchiveRecords_V = 0
5/03/2012 08:25:03.636 : VP2: No history records to process

But even on previous attempts with the correct date and time, Virtual VP said there was no data available for that period:

5/03/2012 08:04:43.195 : VP2: Downloading history from 4/03/2012 11:59:00 PM
5/03/2012 08:04:43.195 : y=2012 m=3 d=4 h=23 m=59
5/03/2012 08:04:44.985 : VP2: DownloadData_V = -32701
5/03/2012 08:04:44.985 : VP2: GetNumberOfArchiveRecords_V = 0
5/03/2012 08:04:44.985 : VP2: No history records to process

5/03/2012 07:58:23.921 : VP2: Downloading history from 4/03/2012 11:59:00 PM
5/03/2012 07:58:23.921 : y=2012 m=3 d=4 h=23 m=59
5/03/2012 07:58:25.777 : VP2: DownloadData_V = -32701
5/03/2012 07:58:25.777 : VP2: GetNumberOfArchiveRecords_V = 0
5/03/2012 07:58:25.777 : VP2: No history records to process

This is presumably the known problem with Virtual VP when asked for archive data by the Davis DLL which Cumulus uses; discovered a couple of years ago and I guess still not fixed. I seem to remember that at the time it did seem to affect mainly users in the southern hemisphere, inexplicably.

[Gordon-Loomberah]

Thanks Steve, I guess that data is gone then, but WL somehow was able to retrieve it Not much happened anyway, almost calm, no rain, and the overnight minimum is only a couple of degrees too high, which I can edit yesterday.ini to fix.

[steve]

Thanks Steve, I guess that data is gone then, but WL somehow was able to retrieve it

Weatherlink doesn't use the Davis DLL, so doesn't cause the problem with Virtual VP.

To get the data, you could download it from the station - stop VVP and reconfigure Cumulus to talk directly to the VP2.

[Gordon-Loomberah]

OK thanks, I might have to, since changing the min temp and time in yesterday.ini seems to have made all that data vanish for Cumulus, all the Recent Extremes for yesterday are now zero ;(

Edit- what effect is that likely to have now I am well past 9am rollover? If its going to involve editing a whole lot of files I'll just accept it is lost data

[steve]

OK thanks, I might have to, since changing the min temp and time in yesterday.ini seems to have made all that data vanish for Cumulus, all the Recent Extremes for yesterday are now zero ;(

You could recover the state of the files as they were at the time you made your first attempt at downloading, by using all of the files from the backup created at that time. Then repeat what you did then (strip back the monthly log, edit today.ini). Ideally you just use a backup from before the problem occurs, then you have no editing to do, but if you rarely stop/start Cumulus, that's probably going back further than you want to. At some point I hope to introduce further 'backups' in addition to the ones taken at start up.

[Gordon-Loomberah]

Thanks Steve! after a few re-starts this morning I had almost filled up my backups quota, the one before 7:58 was way back in Feb, so I had to get it right, and the 8:25am one was where the yesterday's extremes data vanished, and the select a graph had a starting point. (set the interval to start at 6am, but it would only go back to 8:25, I needed to set the start before 11:59pm on 4/3/12 to see more, so I must have stuffed something in there somewhere!) I went back to direct connection and the backed up versions of Mar12log and today.ini were the ones I had already edited, so no further editing required. Restarted on COM4 instead of 6 and did the big download, now its all good again

Re the frequency of the saved backups- obviously it needs to be higher the shorter the set logging interval, as it doesnt take long to go beyond the memory limit at 1 min logging. Daily backups could be good, as generally most users would be aware of a problem within a day, so no data need be lost.