BobTheBlob
Member
Hello.
I appreciate the insights here and the willingness to share. I've got a lot of Rockwell experience, but my Siemens experience is relatively limited and in the somewhat distant past. On a new job assignment now and having trouble getting "useful" S7 archive files for an easy restoration in the case of a catastrophic failure.
This is the issue I'm having.
I have offline project archives for active PLCs we are running here. When I open these archives and do a block comparison, I typically find some blocks newer in the archive than the PLC, and some files newer in the PLC than the archive.
Because I don't know what I have throughout, I thought the best approach was just to take any blocks that have a mismatch and copy them from the online project (PLC0 to my offline (laptop) file.
But the problem now is that it seems when I open blocks with calls to DBs that were built with descriptors(?) (or labels?) in them (in the "Name" column of the DB) I get a mismatch error.
I'm thinking here that when the DBs are loaded from the offline to the PLC, those names don't get passed to the PLC. Is that correct? So the data structure is passed to the PLC but the symbols are not.
The problem is twofold: (1) when I open an FC that has addresses from those DBs, the names are "not available," so I need to click on those spots to even get it to work. But the other problem is that I need to get those descriptors in the archive, or else how do I keep this stuff all aligned so we don't lose those descriptors built into the DBs for the sake of having a harmonized archive file?
The problem is also that I'm reluctant to just dump the "newer" (offline) blocks into the archive, because I'm not yet familiar with what it will do to the data stored in the existing blocks, or the program as it references them, etc, etc, because I'm also still learning the process and the machines here and some are a little complex.
What are best practices for getting these files into a useful archive state? Is there any way to get the data from the blocks in the PLC into the "newer" data blocks in the offline files? Does it make any difference?
Also, if a DB is loaded to the PLC, do those descriptors actually get copied to the PLC? Or is it just the data structure that gets copied to the PLC and those descriptors only ever reside in the offline file? (They look like they are what is used if programming by symbols. But I'm not sure yet how this stuff works.)
Thanks in advance if anyone can help or offer suggestions or any articles or resources.
Feeling a little overwhelmed and the help is appreciated.
Regards,
"Bob" (feeling a little blobby...)
I appreciate the insights here and the willingness to share. I've got a lot of Rockwell experience, but my Siemens experience is relatively limited and in the somewhat distant past. On a new job assignment now and having trouble getting "useful" S7 archive files for an easy restoration in the case of a catastrophic failure.
This is the issue I'm having.
I have offline project archives for active PLCs we are running here. When I open these archives and do a block comparison, I typically find some blocks newer in the archive than the PLC, and some files newer in the PLC than the archive.
Because I don't know what I have throughout, I thought the best approach was just to take any blocks that have a mismatch and copy them from the online project (PLC0 to my offline (laptop) file.
But the problem now is that it seems when I open blocks with calls to DBs that were built with descriptors(?) (or labels?) in them (in the "Name" column of the DB) I get a mismatch error.
I'm thinking here that when the DBs are loaded from the offline to the PLC, those names don't get passed to the PLC. Is that correct? So the data structure is passed to the PLC but the symbols are not.
The problem is twofold: (1) when I open an FC that has addresses from those DBs, the names are "not available," so I need to click on those spots to even get it to work. But the other problem is that I need to get those descriptors in the archive, or else how do I keep this stuff all aligned so we don't lose those descriptors built into the DBs for the sake of having a harmonized archive file?
The problem is also that I'm reluctant to just dump the "newer" (offline) blocks into the archive, because I'm not yet familiar with what it will do to the data stored in the existing blocks, or the program as it references them, etc, etc, because I'm also still learning the process and the machines here and some are a little complex.
What are best practices for getting these files into a useful archive state? Is there any way to get the data from the blocks in the PLC into the "newer" data blocks in the offline files? Does it make any difference?
Also, if a DB is loaded to the PLC, do those descriptors actually get copied to the PLC? Or is it just the data structure that gets copied to the PLC and those descriptors only ever reside in the offline file? (They look like they are what is used if programming by symbols. But I'm not sure yet how this stuff works.)
Thanks in advance if anyone can help or offer suggestions or any articles or resources.
Feeling a little overwhelmed and the help is appreciated.
Regards,
"Bob" (feeling a little blobby...)