Do you have a client that has a huge database and a hard time letting go of old data? Archiving may be a good solution to decrease the database size (therefore increasing the performance) and allow the client to access old data when needed. Using FileMaker Server 10, archiving is made easy and fast by simply exporting data into a temporary .csv file in the documents folder, and then importing the same data into a separate archive database.

Before I show you the 4 steps to server side archiving, there are a few things you should know:

• Filemaker Server 10 can only import and export from the documents folder ([MachineName]/Library/FileMaker Server/ Data/Documents/) or a temporary folder. It can import and export any usual file type except the server cannot export to .fp7. I recommend using .csv because every computer has text edit or some similar application, and you can open the file in excel and see the data nicely.
• You’ll want to use the Get( DocumentsPath ) to construct your importing and exporting file path. The nice thing about using Get(DocumentsPath) is when you run your archiving script from a FileMaker client, your files write to your User/ Documents folder (which is nice for testing) and when the script runs from FileMaker Server, the files will write to the FileMaker Server/ Data/ Documents folder.
• If you are writing the files into a subfolder of the documents folder, be sure that the FileMaker Server Admin has read & write access to that folder, otherwise the export files cannot be written. A folder inside the documents folder is not necessary, but it provides organization.

Here are the steps needed to archive data using FileMaker Server 10: (more…)